Six Memos for the Next Millennium (16 page)
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Authors: Italo Calvino
I have come to the end of this apologia for the novel as a vast net. Someone might object that the more the work tends toward the multiplication of possibilities, the further it departs from that unicum which is the
self
of the writer, his inner sincerity and the discovery of his own truth. But I would answer: Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.
But perhaps the answer that stands closest to my heart is something else: Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the
self
, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic
Was this not perhaps what Ovid was aiming at, when he wrote about the continuity of forms? And what Lucretius was aiming at when he identified himself with that nature common to each and every thing?
*Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (Milan: Garzanti, 1957);
That Awful Mess on Via Merulana
, translated by William Weaver (New York: George Braziller, 1965), pp. 4-6.
*A la recherche du temps perdu: La prisonmere (Paris: Pleiade, Gallimard, 1954), III. 100;
Remembrance of Things Past: The Captive
, translated by C. K. MoncrieflF, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 95.
TALKING IT OVERby Julian Barnes
Through the indelible voices of three narrators—two best friends and the woman they both love—-Julian Barnes reconstructs the romantic triangle as a weapon whose edges cut like razor blades.
“An interplay of serious thought and dazzling wit…. It's moving, it's funny, it's frightening…fiction at its best.” —
The New York Times Book Review
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73687-5
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by A. S. Byatt
An intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets.
“Gorgeously written…dazzling…a tour de force.”
—
The New York Times Book Review
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73590-9
……………………………………………………….
by Albert Camus
Through the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder, Camus explores what he termed “the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.”
Fiction/Literature/0-679-72020-0
……………………………………………
AND THREE STORIES
by Truman Capote
Truman Capote created in Holly Golightly a heroine whose name has entered the American idiom and whose style is now part of the literary landscape. Holly knows that nothing bad can ever happen to you at Tiffany's; her poignancy, wit, and naivete continue to charm.
Also included in this volume are the stories “House of Flowers,” “A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory.”
“Truman Capote is the most perfect writer of my generation. He writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm.” —Norman Mailer
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74565-3
by Ralph Ellison
This searing record of a black man's journey through contemporary America reveals, in Ralph Ellison's words, “the sheer rhetorical challenge involved in communicating across our barriers of race and religion, class, color and region.”
“The greatest American novel in the second half of the twentieth century…the classic representation of American black experience.” —R.W. B. Lewis
Fiction/Literature/0-679-72313-7
…………………………………………
by William Faulkner
The tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in American literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant.
“For range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity, [Faulkner's works] are without equal in our time and country.” —Robert Penn Warren
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73224-1
…………………………………………….
by E. M. Forster
Caught up in a world of social snobbery, Lucy Honeychurch breaks from the claustrophobic constraints of her British guardians and takes control of her own fate, finding love with a man whose free spirit reminds her of a “room with a view.”
Fiction/Literature/0-679-72476-1
……………………………………………….
by Kazuo Ishiguro
A profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world in postwar England.
'One of the best books of the year.” —
The New York Times Book Review
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73172-5
……………………………………….
by Maxine Hong Kingston
“A remarkable book…As an account of growing up female and Chinese- American in California, in a laundry of course, it is anti-nostalgic; it burns the fat right out of the mind. As a dream—of the ‘female avenger’—it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword.” —
The New York Times
Nonfiction/Literature/0-679-72188-6
by Cormac McCarthy
At sixteen, John Grady Cole finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
“A book of remarkable beauty and strength, the work of a master in perfect command of his medium.” —
Washington Post Book World
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74439-8
AND SEVEN OTHER STORIES
by Thomas Mann
In addition to “Death in Venice” (“A story,” Mann said, “of death…of the voluptuousness of doom”), this volume includes “Mario the Magician,” “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” “A Man and His Dog,” “Felix Krull,” “The Blood of the Walsungs,” “Tristan,” and “Tonio Kroger.”
Fiction/Literature/0-679-72206-8
…………………………………………….
by Vladimir Nabokov
The famous and controversial novel that tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.
“The only convincing love story of our century.” —
Vanity Fair
Fiction/Literature/0-679-72316-1
……………………………………….
by Michael Ondaatje
During the final moments of World War II, four damaged people come together in a deserted Italian villa. As their stories unfold, a complex tapestry of image and emotion, recollection and observation is woven, leaving them inextricably connected by the brutal, improbable circumstances of war.
“It seduces and beguiles us with its many-layered mysteries, its brilliantly taut and lyrical prose, its tender regard for its characters.” —
Newsday
Winner of the Booker Prize
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74520-3
………………………………………………….
by Norman Rush
A female American anthropologist of high intellect and grand passion, at loose ends in Botswana, finds love with Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who is rumored to have founded a Utopian society in the Kalahari Desert.
“A complex and moving love story…breathtaking in its cunningly intertwined intellectual sweep and brio…a major novel.” —
Chicago Tribune
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73709-X
……………………………………….
by William Styron
A young Southerner who yearns to become a writer befriends Nathan, a tortured, brilliant Jew, and his beautiful lover, Sophie, becoming a witness to their turbulent love-hate affair and to the burdens of Sophie's unbearable secret.
“Styron's most impressive performance…. It belongs on that small shelf reserved for American masterpieces.” —
Washington Post Book World
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73637-9
……………………………………………
by Graham Swift
Set in the bleak Fen country of East Anglia and spanning some 240 years,
Waterland
is “a gothic family saga, a detective story and a philosophical meditation on the nature and uses of history”
(The New York Times).
“Teems with energy, fertility, violence, madness…demonstrates the irrepressible, wide-ranging talent of this young British writer.”
—
Washington Post Book World
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73979-3
………………………………………….
by Jeanette Winterson
Intertwining the destinies of two remarkable people—the soldier Henri, for eight years Napoleon's faithful cook, and Villanelle, the red-haired daughter of a Venetian boatman—
The Passion
is “a deeply imagined and beautiful book, often arrestingly so”
(The New York Times Book Review).
Fiction/Literature/0-679-72437-0
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Available at your bookstore or call toll-free to order: 1-800-793-2665.
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FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, SEPTEMBER 1993
Copyright
©
1988 by the Estate of halo Calvino
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Com entions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Calvino, Italo.
[Essays. English. Selections]
Six memos for the next millennium / Italo Calvino. — 1st Vintage international ed. p. cm.
Collects five of six lectures Italo Calvino was about to deliver at the time of his death in 1985.
Originally published: Cambridge, Mass.: Hanard University Press, 1988.
eISBN: 978-0-307-54611-1
1. Literature — Philosophy. 2. Style, Literary. 3. Literature
— History and criticism. I. Title.
PN45.C3313 1993
801— dc20 92-50641
CIP
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