Ok, so I just finished reading “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller” and I was delighted by it (although it did get kind of tiring as the metaplot about the pathological-liar-translator got more bizarre). For the first half especially, though, I was tickled pink-- I’ve been studying narrative/ narratology a bit lately and Calvino really just played with all of the textual and narrative traditions we take for granted. I like the occasional book that makes one think about all the characteristics and behaviors of narratives and stories that one had stopped bothering to think about or had never had the opportunity to worry about. Terribly clever. Thumbs-up.
I’ve also read lots of Eco and a tad of Borges-- any recommendations of other things of this sort?
Have you read Calvino’s INVISIBLE CITIES? It’s a series of very short chapters as Marco Polo describes for Kublai Kahn cities he’s visited. Every city has the name of a woman and a two page description is given. Hard to describe, but brilliant. (Gore Vidal’s obituary of Calvino is also good.)
‘The Baron in the Trees’ was also quite good.
BTW, I was amused by your mention of Eco and Borges, as it reminded me of my own discovery of those writers. I started off in college with Stanislaw Lem (whom I discovered through snippets of ‘The Cyberiad’ on Usenet), then got into Calvino because of Lem’s frequent mentioning of his work. Calvino, in turn (as well as Eco), often make refernces to Borges, which led me to him.
Funny, I just bought “las cosmicomicas”. Only because someone compared Italo Calvino with Jorge Luis Borges (one of my favourite writers).
To the op, If you haven’t read it I recommend “Fictions” by borges, a short story with some of the best of his works. There is one story in there “the secret miracle” that is just magnificent.