On October 15, 1923, Italo Calvino was born fortuitously in Cuba – his parents delayed their return to Italy when the pregnancy occurred. A decentered start in life which announces the radical singularity of this spirit as agile as it is virtuoso.
To celebrate this centenary, while awaiting the entry of the man of letters into the prestigious “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade”, in April 2024, in an edition entrusted to Yves Hersant, the documentary proposed by Duccio Chiarini delivers precious milestones in order to understand the man, the storyteller as well as the science lover, the political activist and the moralist who reinvented the philosophical tale.
Break with the Communist Party
If it lacks the slightly crazy charm of a thought which bases its irresistible fantasy on a strict respect for realism and logic, we will be grateful to the authors for providing some decisive stages of a journey inscribed in the history of his time. His deep boredom during the fascist episode, of tedious grandiloquence, where the child escapes into drawing and cinemas; his engagement, at age 20, in the ranks of the supporters of the Garibaldi Brigades, linked to the Italian Communist Party; his break with the party when the invasion of Hungary by Soviet troops in the fall of 1956 was not denounced…
If this trauma condemns Calvino to limit himself henceforth to literary commitment alone, reading the work reveals its traces. Like Pino, a young child lost between those of his age and the adult world, in search of his place in The Path of Spiders’ Nests, his first novel published in 1947, Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo, hero of Baron Perché (1957), middle part of the Our Ancestors trilogy, by renouncing the society of his time to climb trees from which he will never come down, does much more than abstract himself from the contingencies that hinder him: he grants himself a new way of being at world, sees differently, delivers other messages of knowledge.
It is not surprising that this text, composed at the moment when Calvino broke with the political mirage, opens the most fruitful path for the writer. The change takes place in Paris, which Calvino considers a “gigantic city of reference”. His young wife, Chichita, an adopted Parisian, helps with the hatching.
From Invisible Cities (1972) and The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) to If on a Winter Night a Traveler (1979), Calvino experienced a decisive partnership with the members of Oulipo – he translated Les Fleurs bleues in 1967, by Raymond Queneau (1965) -, wonderfully at ease with constrained forms of writing and combinatorial systems.
Art and science for a unique creation. Without doubt Mr. Palomar’s telescope (1983), where the perceptions of the distant and the near are reversed, is the best tool for playing with Calvino.