Jul 23, 2024
Where should I start with Italo Calvino? I recently read The Path to the Spiders' Nest, his amazing first novel, and would like to read more, but hesitate to go through his work chronilogically. Any advice?
Where should I start with Italo Calvino? I recently read The Path to the Spiders' Nest, his amazing first novel, and would like to read more, but hesitate to go through his work chronilogically. Any advice?
“If on a winter’s night a traveler” is probably his most popular work and also my favorite. “Cosmicomics” veers from annoyingly zany to hilarious and sad and profound. “Invisible Cities” is fun but maybe too much of a good thing. His early “Ancestors” works, the short novels “The Cloven Viscount”, “The Baron in the Trees” and “The Nonexistent Knight” are short and silly, good for an afternoon each. “The Castle of Crossed Destinies” centers around the tarot which bores the hell out of me but maybe it’s your jam. I’ve never read his first novel! Do you normally start with an author’s debut or was it just coincidence?
I’ll probably go with the Cloven Viscount then since that’s chronological and I won’t have to come to a conclusive decision just yet! I don’t usually start with an author’s earliest work, but if I like them I usually do go through the rest of their work chronologically so I can follow their development. I read Path to the Spiders’ Nest because I like movies from the neorealism film movement, in both modern America and post-WWII Italy, and wanted to explore the literary aspect of the movement which Calvino’s first book is considered a part of. It’s also about partisans, and I always love a rebel.
OK that sounds like it's worth a squint, I'll grab it from the library today. I like the idea of reading chronologically for the insight it gives into a writer; what stops me is that the early stuff is sometimes not as good... I guess I'm more into individual works than corpuses, and there are way too many writers. Like I'd rather read Author B's magnum opus than Author A's lesser-known sophomore effort. I think my only encounter with Italian neorealism was Bicycle Thieves... looking forward to reconciling that with Calvino!