Calvino's If on a winter's night

About If on a winter's night

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) was the most formally inventive of the great Italian postwar writers — a novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose work ranged from the realistic partisan novel The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947) to the comic fairy-tale retellings of Italian Folktales (1956) to the speculative fictions of the Cosmicomics series (1965) to the postmodern metafictions of Invisible Cities (1972), The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973), and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). Born in Cuba to Italian parents and raised in San Remo, he worked in Turin for the publisher Einaudi and was a close associate of Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg, and Cesare Pavese. His late theoretical work, collected in the posthumous Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), articulated the literary values — lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, consistency — that he had pursued across his career. If on a winter's night a traveler is his most formally radical work, a novel in which the reader ('you') is the protagonist; Invisible Cities is his most beloved; The Baron in the Trees is his most accessible.