hidden in the trees - Calvino, the unreconstructed formalist
Thursday, May 26th, 2005
“To make everything that you will see and hear in your life stem from your first childhood memory is a literary temptation.” - Italo Calvino
After an initial correspondence with a newfound friend who devours biographies of writers much how I devour the books they write themselves, her energy got me to do some digging on a writer I use to abhor, but now think I must have been on drugs (okay, bad joke) not to love, Italo Calvino. I discovered this telling essay in Bookforum by Minna Proctor. In it, Proctor tries to unravel what is it that makes Calvino, Calvino? A man who fashioned many different endings, unlimited beginnings, massive edits to Hermit in Paris - Calvino’s attempt to construct his autobiography. How was it, why was it, that Calvino want to fiction these extraordinary, surreal realities - yet always using a part of himself in the work, there is always a hint of autobiography (Baron was loosely based on Calvino’s own decision to leave his family of well-grounded scientists to live in the “netherworld” of literature). When asked by his wife why he hadn’t sat down and wrote his full story, his response was fitting for Calvino, a brilliant man with the eyes and mind of an imaginative child - there was so much to say, so many ways to tell the story, not yet. A writer unable to complete the linear sentence, but creates unworldly possibilities, a limitless life, intrigues me.
