Six Memos for the Next Millennium - Softcover

Calvino, Italo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0224033115 ISBN 13: 9780224033114

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1992

Synopsis

A series of lectures which Italo Calvino wrote in the final year of his life. For him, the project became an obsession. He intended there to be six lectures - in fact he died before he could complete the sixth and before he could deliver any of them - but the five we do have amount to a message about the making of literature. Drawing on the works of Lucretius, Ovid, Boccaccio, Flaubert, Kundera, Perec and many more, he pinpoints the universal laws and literary values: "lightness" - the need to bear the gravity of existence lightly; "quickness" - a deftness in combining action with contemplation; "exactitude" - the need for precision and clarity in language; "visibility" - the visual imagination as an instrument for knowing the world; and "multiplicity" - the exhilirating infinitude of possibilities open to humankind.

About this title

Product Description:

Six Memos for the Next Millennium:

Review:

‘A rather wonderful little book, full of wit and erudition' -- Daily Telegraph

‘As commentary on fiction's strategies and possibilities, the book is alive with stimulating suggestivity...exhilarating and poignant' -- Peter Kemp, Sunday Times

‘Calvino will continue to glitter... well into the next millennium and after, a master in the empire of the imagination' -- Ian Thomson, Independent on Sunday

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0224033115
• ISBN 13: 9780224033114
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 136