According to Critic JoAnn Cannon, the key to Italo Calvino's renowned final novel, "Mr. Palomar" (1983), lies in several innovative literary ideas outlined in three essays written in the 1950s (and now included in the 1982 collection "Una pietra sopa"). These...
[more]According to Critic JoAnn Cannon, the key to Italo Calvino's renowned final novel, "Mr. Palomar" (1983), lies in several innovative literary ideas outlined in three essays written in the 1950s (and now included in the 1982 collection "Una pietra sopa"). These essays grappled with his contemporaries' tendency to place an undue amount of attention on objectivity at the expense of consciousness. Calvino insisted that literature should attempt to reaffirm this distinction, but not to the point of sinking into a labyrinth of pessimism. Calvino wanted to explore the possible escapes from this web. "Mr. Palomar" was his answer.
A paragon of Postmodernism, "Mr. Palomar" sought to fight the demon of objectivity. Borrowing from Heidegger's philosophy, Calvino emphasized the narrator's role as viewer to further highlight the gulf between the observer and the world. Mr. Palomar glides through the novel watching, trying to resolve his own "crisis of reason."
Calvino wrote because words gave him a sense of home, of belonging. Born in Cuba to German parents, his family moved to Italy when he was still young. Calvino himself claims that this move created a "geographical instability that makes me forever long for somewhere else." Ultimately, he discovered that that "somewhere else" was in his books. He joined the Italian Resistance during World War II -- out of that experience came two of his first works, "The Path to the Nest of Spiders" (1947) and "Adam, One Afternoon, and Other Stories" (1949).
Beginning in the 1950s, Calvino focused on writing the fantasy stories that would bring him international fame. Some of his most famous works include "The Nonexistent Knight & the Cloven Viscount," "The Baron in the Trees," "Cosmicomics," "Invisible Cities," and "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller." Just before his death in 1985, Calvino was writing a series of lectures on writing. "Six Memos For the New Millenium" charts Calvino's theory of writing, the first five lectures covering tropes that are eminently prevalent in Calvino's own work: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. The sixth lecture, never written, was to discuss consistency. Instead, with a kind of appropriate poetic justice, we are left speculating on the open-endedness of this piece, and indeed, of all of Calvino's provocative works.
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