Italo Calvino by Martin McLaughlin (review)

Abstract

I have only two minor reservations.First,De Van takesa rathercavalierattitude toward recent Verdian literature. Sometimes he gives the impression of having come acrossimportantessaystoo late to include them fullyin his discussion,and, as with PieroWeiss'swidely readarticleon 'Verdiand the Fusionof Genres',he simply mentions them in a footnote. Secondly, there are tracesof the old-fashioned(andto my mind no longer defensible) opinion that the language of Verdi's librettos is 'pompous' and 'meaningless' (p. 83), 'vapid' and 'rathersurrealist'(p. 85). Unless we are prepared to criticize in these terms the language of Alfieri's tragedies or Manzoni's poems, we should stop using them for Piave, Cammarano and their colleagues.Apartfrom these minor quibbles, Verdi's Theater is a very good book, one that should prove especially useful to those scholars of European literature and culture who are in search of a truly interdisciplinaryassessmentof the composer's dramaturgy. CHRISTCHURCH,OXFORD EMANUELE SENICI Italo Calvino. By MARTINMCLAUGHLIN.(Writers of Italy) Edinburgh: Edinburgh UniversityPress. 1998. xvi + 190pp. ?40 (paperbound 1I4.95). In a famous letter to Guido Fink, one of his reviewers, Calvino explained in i968 that his realinterestlay in the knowledgethat he was contributingto the shapingof that complex phenomenon which goes by the name of culture.Belongingto a world of ideas and aestheticsmatteredmore to him than the rankingof hisfiction amongst his predecessors or his contemporaries, as the value of literary works depends, ultimately, on the variables of future culturalperspectives and is therefore, in any case, symbolic of a collective effort.Martin McLaughlin'sanalysismoves from this conceptual vantage point, showing how the dialogue between Calvino and his critics,which includes himself as critical editor of his own work, together with the dialogue between him and other writers is vital both to his creativity and to our appreciationof his ceuvre. The book is divided into ten chapters.The firstfour are devoted to workswritten up to I963, while the fifth deals with their thematic concerns. Chapters 6-9 concentrate on his later, and probably better known, fictions, and the tenth is dedicated to Calvino's style. Together with introduction and conclusion, an exhaustive chronology of fictional texts, listed in order of composition, and a rich critical bibliography complete this highly commendable volume. McLaughlin's excellent surveyconstitutesthe most up-to-date studyof thiswriterin English,both in terms of range of sources and of analytic clarity.A wealth of referencesto nonfictionalwritingspublishedat the same time as his fictionprovidesthe contextualization in intellectual history needed by any serious reader of literature, but indispensableto an understandingof this particularlyseductiveand seemingly easy writer. In-depth analysis of textual strategies throws light on layers of successful compositionalpractice:fromlinguisticchoices (useof alliteration,sentencestructure and recurrenceof words and phrases)to excision of passagesor the addition of new ones and the likelyreasonsfor the changes;fromthe opening and closingof sections to the selection (or de-selection and indeed re-selection) of material for successive collections; from the sophisticated network of intertextual links (for example, not only the one between Cosimo and Robinson Crusoe, in the literaryfield, but also between Agilulfo and the 'organisationman' in consumer society whose identikit comes from contemporaneousstudiesin sociology)to the constantneed to establish new symmetries and overlapping of possibilities. The complexity of the resulting I have only two minor reservations.First,De Van takesa rathercavalierattitude toward recent Verdian literature. Sometimes he gives the impression of having come acrossimportantessaystoo late to include them fullyin his discussion,and, as with PieroWeiss'swidely readarticleon 'Verdiand the Fusionof Genres',he simply mentions them in a footnote. Secondly, there are tracesof the old-fashioned(andto my mind no longer defensible) opinion that the language of Verdi's librettos is 'pompous' and 'meaningless' (p. 83), 'vapid' and 'rathersurrealist'(p. 85). Unless we are prepared to criticize in these terms the language of Alfieri's tragedies or Manzoni's poems, we should stop using them for Piave, Cammarano and their colleagues.Apartfrom these minor quibbles, Verdi's Theater is a very good book, one that should prove especially useful to those scholars of European literature and culture who are in search of a truly interdisciplinaryassessmentof the composer's dramaturgy. CHRISTCHURCH,OXFORD EMANUELE SENICI Italo Calvino. By MARTINMCLAUGHLIN.(Writers of Italy) Edinburgh: Edinburgh UniversityPress. 1998. xvi + 190pp. ?40 (paperbound 1I4.95). In...