Italo Calvino: the craft of writing

“I would like to find for each book another me, another voice, another name, to be reborn”affirmed Italo Calvino through one of his characters. Remarks taken up by Yves Hersant in the preface to the volume of “Pléiade” which is dedicated to him, one hundred and one years after the birth of the Italian novelist, undoubtedly the most gifted of his generation, that of Pasolini, Leonardo Sciascia, Primo Levi and Giorgio Manganelli. Eight novels collected here, and newly translated, out of the ten he has published since The Viscount slain until Mr. Palomar passing through Le Baron why his best known, rightly so, and Invisible Cities.

In total, a rigorous work, of great imaginative audacity, thought out down to the smallest details, marked by the refusal of lyricism and autofiction and the autobiographical genre which invade us today to the point of nausea. And this desire, as Yves Hersant reminds us in his introduction, “to understand the complexity of the world, by rejecting…