Dennis Duncan

Publisher, translator, novelist, critic and polyglot: the many lives of Italo Calvino

The learning on display in this latest Collected Non-Fiction is as astonishing as ever – though ‘B-sides and Rarities’ might describe the more marginal pieces

Italo Calvino in 1984. [Getty Images] 
issue 18 February 2023
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  • The Written World and the Unwritten World: Collected Non-Fiction

    Italo Calvino, translated by Ann Goldstein

    Penguin, pp. 384, £10

In retrospective mood, just months before the stroke that killed him, Italo Calvino mused on the character of his own writing. ‘The time has come for me to look for an overall definition for my work,’ he wrote. ‘I would suggest this: my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight.’

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