The Written World and the Unwritten World review: More memos for a new millennium

An early essay in the book deals with the art of selecting books to take on vacation, and how they remain untouched at the end of it. (Representational image: Armin Rimoldi via Pexels)

It was wickedly said of Jimi Hendrix that he released more albums after his death than when he was alive. Writers can be subject to a similar fate, even if not matching Hendrix's numerical standards. To take one example, it seems that not a year goes by without the discovery of another manuscript by Roberto Bolaño among his papers.

Of course, this shouldn’t be cause for complaint. With cherished authors, more can be merrier -- provided that the work is not simply a collection of odds and ends cobbled together to make the faithful reach for their wallets.

(Photo: Johan Brun/Wikimedia Commons 4.0)

During his lifetime, Italo Calvino published several novels, short fiction and non-fiction. In the years after his death in 1985, many further volumes appeared: among them, the autobiographical Hermit in Paris; transcribed lectures in Six Memos for the Next Millennium; and a collection of early short stories, Numbers in the Dark.

Now, there is The Written World and the Unwritten World, a work of “collected non-fiction” translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. Fortunately, there's more to savour than to skip.

Here, there is ample evidence that Calvino was adept at playing with linguistic registers, as Jhumpa Lahiri pointed out in an earlier essay. He alternates between high and low, humour and seriousness, philosophy and fantasy. “His objective-subjective gaze,” in Lahiri’s words, “took in the world along with the cosmos, the everyday and the eternal.”

Appropriately, then, these letters, lectures, interviews and essays are divided into four sections. The longest and most rewarding is the one on reading, writing and translating, which is followed by pieces on publishing; the fantastic; and science, history and anthropology.

Calvino’s prized lightness of touch is evident throughout. An early essay deals with the art of selecting books to take on vacation, and how they remain untouched at the end of it. He also notes the perceived lack of adventure in Italian novels. How can this be rectified? “If I knew, I wouldn’t be here explaining it: I would write it.”

His observations on the fate of the novel can sound prescient. In a 1956 piece, he hopes for a future of books “full of new intelligence, like the new energies and machines of production”. But he doesn’t think they will be novels as we knew them. Genres of eighteenth-century literature — the essay, the travelogue, the utopia, the philosophical or satirical story, the dialogues, the moral tale — will have to “regain their place as protagonists of literature, of historical intelligence and social battle”.

In a later essay from 1984, he further comments that the future may hold other modes of reading, and it’s misplaced “to deplore every technological novelty in the name of danger to humanistic values”. A more advanced society will be richer “in stimuli, in choices, in possibilities, in different tools” and will “need to read, need things to read and people who read”. Fingers crossed.

Calvino’s observations on the writers he admires are illuminating. He loves Stendhal above all else, and Pushkin’s “clarity, irony, and seriousness”. Chekhov, “because he doesn’t go farther than where he’s going” and Conrad, “because he navigates the abyss and doesn’t sink into it”. He loves Tolstoy because “at times I seem to be about to understand how he does it and then I don’t”.

“I love Gogol,” he continues, “because he distorts with clarity, meanness, and moderation,” and Dostoyevsky, “because he distorts with consistency, fury, and lack of moderation”. Of women writers, there’s Katherine Mansfield “because she’s intelligent,” and Jane Austen, “because I never read her but I’m glad she exists”.

What drives him is the tension between the written and the unwritten. “From the other side of the words, from the silent side, something is trying to emerge, to signify through language, like tapping on a prison wall”. The writer’s task, then, is to give “the shape of intelligible reality to a set of confused sensations”.

Calvino’s work has long been beloved in translation. He feels that for an author, reflecting on and discussing the translation of one’s own text with the translator is the true way of reading oneself, of understanding what has been written and why. Literature works in “the untranslatable margins” which translators grapple with.

Mariner Books; 384 pages; Rs1,658.

Some of his most noted books belong to the realm of the fantastical, and he offers an insightful reading of the genre. In a piece on Arthurian grail legends, he observes that epic poetry is sustained more by the emotions of defeat than those of victory. In another essay, he writes of how 19th century fantastical tales revolve around the relationship between “the reality of the world we inhabit…and the reality of the world of thought”.

Admittedly, the general reader will not be gripped by some pieces, such as reviews of Arnold van Gennep’s The Rites of Passage and Renato and Rosellina Balbi’s Long Journey to the Center of the Brain. On the whole, though, there is more than enough to make it a satisfying addition to the Calvino corpus.

In a review of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The View from Afar reproduced here, Calvino writes that “the book has a richness and density of ideas and suggestions,” and is an example of “a mind that is always open and free”. That’s an apt description of this volume, too.