Some writers spend their careers happily producing variations on the same book. Others seem to rethink the sort of book they would like to write with each new work. Only a very few, however, have a career which looks like a planned trajectory into something completely new; you would not predict Tolstoy’s late fables from his first autobiographical sketches, or the opaque fantasy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake from the dogged realism of Dubliners. And yet all the steps in between are carefully considered, and the career makes perfect sense.
Italo Calvino was very much one of those writers. Born in Cuba of Italian parents in 1923, by the time of his early death in 1985 he was fêted not just in Italy but all over the world, and would surely have won the Nobel Prize. He was one of an immensely gifted generation of Italian writers to emerge after the second world war; like the great film-makers of the time, they seemed to possess both a richness of human experience and a refined technical skill in treating it. Calvino’s first books — The Path to the Spider’s Nest and the wonderful short stories collected in Adam, One Afternoon — are beautiful pieces of realism, touched with fantasy and symbolism, but always solidly rooted in the world. With these books, he got his personal history as a fighting member of the Italian resistance down on paper, and moved quickly on.
By the end of his career, he had turned himself into an international figure, writing highly theoretical fantasies. Late books like The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Invisible Cities and If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller turn the novel inside out. One reveals a ruthlessly mathematical structure of permutations underneath the storytelling; another is a series of structured evocations of impossible towns; the third an exercise in frustrated novel openings in which the real subject is the reader’s aching desire to continue. The late works are wonderful, fascinating objects, refined and glittering.
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