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5 out of 5
by
Nick
from
The United States | Mar 6, 2008
Calvino is just so effortlessly wonderful. He and literature have a very intimate relationship and she tells him secrets about herself that no one else gets to hear. Until now! Calvino spills the beans on what are the qualities he feels are most important to the literature of the future: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity.
I think my favorites were lightness and multiplicity considering that quickness, exactitude, and visibility seem to be very self-evidently positive qualities of literature (who wants to read a slow, vague, abstract novel?) But the idea of lightness as a positive quality was fresh for me: not lightness as insubstantial but rather, "be light like the bird, not the feather." And the goal of literature as a connector of the wildly disparate knowledges of the modern world, the multiplicity of knowledge in every book, I think is a courageous call to arms, especially if coupled with quickness and lightness.
Calvino occasionally meanders a wee bit too far from his topics in the essays but his digressions are terrifically thought-provoking. His vast knowledge of world literature is also inspiring--he basically provides a list of great authors you should read (if they're good enough for Calvino...).
Although this has the potential to be a little bit too academic for some, I heartily recommend this as caviar for a hungry mind.
2 people found this review helpful
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5 out of 5
by
Tim
from
Exeter, NH | Sep 20, 2009
I've had the uncanny experience of having read this book around when it came out and forgotten most of it, yet rereading it is sort of like being under hypnosis, as it essentially embodies a great deal of what I strive for in my own aesthetic and weltanschauung and how I prepare food and live when you get down to it. In his ode to lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity, Calvino dazzles in his apparently effortless incorporation of all of these qualities, even while admitting their opposites into the fold, confessing an affection for weight, digression, and so forth. For contradiction is elemental for Calvino, an inevitable byproduct of an authentic, reflective engagement with the universe. And so he gives us his motto from "youth on," the Latin "Festina lente," hurry slowly. Hurrying slowly herein, he whets our appetites for Dante, Leopardi, Ponge, and Carlo Emilia Gadda, as well as for revisiting Calvino's own oeuvre in all of its spindly, acrobatic glory. I can only wonder--had Calvino completed the last lecture, "Consistency," and published it, whether it would have made me a slightly different person. Few books you can say that about.
2 people found this review helpful
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5 out of 5
by
Ryan
from
The United States | Sep 17, 2009
Italo Calvino's lectures on his hope for the future of literature show a deep understanding of both its changing and persistent qualities.
Italian writer Italo Calvino (1923-1985) starts Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Trans. Patrick Creagh. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988, ISBN: 0679742379) off with a single paragraph introduction, stating near the end of it that his "confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it." The segregation of different art forms is mainly decided by the particular, unique function that it serves. Calvino's introductory statement must be either the beginning of a defense of literature or a rallying of the literary troops to keep fighting the good fight. Of course, it's both.
(Note: Calvino died before completing the sixth memo, a speech on “consistency.”)
Lightness
Even when writing about otherworldly things, the experiences of the author and the audience are all based on human experience. With this density in mine, Calvino describes "lightness" as – amongst other things – a "lightening of language whereby meaning is conveyed through a verbal texture that seems weightless, until the meaning itself takes on the same rarefied consistency." This highlights Calvino's focus on both appropriateness as a key theme in all aspects of literature and an almost slow-churning of language, where it must unify (balance, perhaps) itself with the subject.
As most descriptive power comes from the truest metaphor, Calvino ends up echoing the Aristotelian idea that the essence of a riddle is to express true facts under impossible combinations. Because word-soup won’t do, metaphor will have to.
Lightness as the embodiment of the best language and coordinating best weight for the subject matter has been a desirable quality of literature forever, and in this chapter Calvino speaks of language as made up of "a fine dust of atoms, like everything else that goes to make up the ultimate substance of the multiplicity of things."
Quickness
In the present and for the future, Calvino encapsulated the idea of size and magnitude into "multiplicity" as well as the closely-related "quickness" and "exactitude" (which appear one right after the other in the book).
Though economy has been used in terms of language, Calvino applies that very term to the embodiment of concepts in objects, saying that with "quickness" the "secret of the story lies in its economy: the events, however long they last, become punctiform, connected by rectilinear segments, in a zigzag pattern that suggests incessant motion." Calvino is speaking of achieving the maximum immediacy of literature while getting the most mileage out of the language as possible.
Exactitude
Where "quickness" dealt with an appropriateness of detail, "exactitude" is said to deal with a precision of detail. In the realm of style, Calvino agrees with those who came before him, speaking to the importance of "exactitude" and through it the necessity for "a well defined and well-calculated plan for the work in question." In establishing a bond between the writer and the reader, there must be characters or events that either purposely gel with the definition in question or purposely defy it.
The fiction definition uses logos (the factual truth), pathos (the emotional truth), and ethos (the believable truth) to form the connection. With a nod to Burke's discussion of definitions and man as a symbol-using creature, Calvino champions finding the correct definitions in order to use them to the best purposes of exactitude.
Visibility
From there Calvino moves on to "visibility," speaking to an image's ability to convey ideas, moving from either word to image or image to word. This includes the correlation between the two, making words appear as their appropriate corresponding image.
Calvino again echoes Aristotle by stating his method of trying to "establish which meanings might be compatible with the overall design [he wishes:] to give the story and which meanings are not compatible." This weaves a thread through the history of literary craft and entwines not just precision of detail, but rhetorical philosophies on imitation, imagination, and the terministic screen. Calvino has given anyone who reads this book the strongest foundation possible to move forward with literature.
Multiplicity
Calvino ends with his chapter on "multiplicity," addressing the right time to simplify the complex connections between two things and how to do it in an appropriate manner. Upon much speak of uncontrollable convergences and tangential whirlpools of unforeseen consequences and effects, Calvino looks at complexity not as a clear decision between the simple or the complex, but as a balance between "exactitude – or at other times mathematics, pure spirit, or even the military mentality," and "soul, or irrationality, humanity, chaos."
This goes well with what he says on the following page about balancing the ever-mixing universe and void. There exists the question of how and when multitasking is acceptable within a piece of literature, a question that Calvino claims can be aided by brevity: the key that lets a writer "unite density of invention and expression with a sense of infinite possibilities." He strives for a portable philosophy.
A Plea for Personal Theory
The resounding idea that something is correct (functional and beautiful) if it works, lays behind everything Calvino says in his memos. His book serves the purpose of reminding everyone to think and write and think and write, regardless of theory and rules. An anti-theory theory book? Maybe, but it's more likely that Six Memos For the Next Millennium will serve as proof of literature's artistic essence, with Calvino as a general on his horse, firing-up writers for the war of the words.
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4 out of 5
by
Christopherseelie
from
Las Vegas, NV | Jul 18, 2009
An erudite collection of lectures Calvino would have delivered at Harvard University had he not died. Despite the title, there are actually 5 essays, each based on a literary quality Calvino holds dear. He uses examples from classical and modern literature, giving a slight priority to Italian writers but mainly to make up for the dearth of attention they receive in America. A worthy bias. He explains his own process, and I wish he hadn't been so modest in this regard. But good taste compelled him to rely on other models which makes the lectures serve double duty as literary criticism and craft talk. The bottom line: short and informative. Well worth the read.
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4 out of 5
by
John
from
Seattle, WA | Sep 17, 2008
Before he died, Calvino wrote five of six essays planned for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in the U.S. In his essays, Calvino explores what he thinks are the critical elements that literature needs to survive into what was then the next millennium. Written over 20 years ago, the book shows a little age (Calvino focuses on negative effects of television that have been magnified by computer games and the Internet), but on measure the book retains relevance.
Calvino wrote on Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity. The sixth essay, on Consistency, was not written. How Calvino defines his topics is as interesting as his arguments in favor of them, and he does not argue strict definitions. Exactitude may be reached through narrow definitions or broadly. The essay on Visibility, charmingly, begins with the statement, "I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains."
Each essay considers the opposite of the topic (darkness, slowness, imprecision, invisibility, singularity) to better define what Calvino means. He does not exclude opposites. Rather, he shows how the opposites are essential to understand his topic. He also likes to choose third ways, avoiding the confines of dualism.
The collection is worth reading for anyone who has an interest in literature. Although Calvino quotes passages from several languages, the book helpfully provides translations. There were a couple of sections where Calvino's philosophy was less than clear, in the essay on Exactitude, and so the collection will bear rereading.