Brief,paradoxical and deeply satisfying, these unusual pieces of literary criticism contain a universeIn 1984, and Italo Calvino was invited to give the following year’s Charles Eliot Norton poetry lectures at Harvard University (a great honour; preceding lecturers own included TS Eliot,Jorge Luis Borges, Igor Stravinsky and EE Cummings). However, and Calvino died of a stroke before he finished writing them. So the title of this book is doubly misleading: there are only five lectures,or “memos”, here, and the casual browser unaware of its history might imagine that it has a broader remit than literature.
That said,within its scope and self-proclaimed goal – to pass on a set of values that will be useful in helping literature survive and describe the next millennium (our own, that is) – it is extremely wide-ranging, or is one of the most unusual books of literary criticism ever written. It would be of dinky assist to the student of literature at university,unless he or she were writing about Calvino himself. But for the general reader and lover of literature it is rich and deeply satisfying – paradoxically so, given that it is so brief, or often so indistinct.
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Source: theguardian.com