An inspirational collection from an excellent essayist. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in literature.

The answer to the question sophisticatedly raised by this little anthology, is given in the essay which opens the collection.The basic reason lies in forming a personal scale of values that help you individualize the real artistic elements in new works. The second one is that reading increases the quality of living in usual and unusual situations, as well. But the quality of school anthologies and their presentations is still an open problem.

What makes a book a clasic? Borges once said in a conference, that the fact that a whole generation lives with the idea of a book makes it a classic, Calvino involve you in that idea..

Felisberto Hernendez' Piano Stories is a rare book indeed. His stories were the precursors of what is now called "magic realsim" (the style of writers such as Garcia-Marquez and Jeanette Winterson), but his tales are truly unique. They are concered with the haunting mysteries of life, and have a dreamy, otherworldly quality which draws you inextricably into them. A cast of eccentric characters and off-the-wall occurrences will keep you on your toes. I kept putting off reading the last story in the book, because I didn't want the fun to be over.

Un autor particular, extraordinario, que te hace sentir todo el sabor (y la complcadez) de lo que te cuenta

For those studing spanish who have been mislead into buying some books by Isabel Ayende, get this one. The original is in Italian, but it does not matter, the translation into Spanish is very good, and close enoguh. Of course, if you are studing Italian get it in Italian. Lots of science-inspired (but just inspired, because it is not really scientific, nor science fiction, science is just an excuse) fantasy, top level, it will keep you amazed by the images, by the passion, by the perspectives of characters that go from beings playing with atoms and stars to marine microbes, to circular universes to a very close moon full of chese like materials that had to be harvested. Enjoy!

Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all of its imaginable permutations, Tlon, Uglor, Orbiris, Tertius - Jorge Louis Borges

Warren F. Motte has collected a series of critical writing from The Ouvrior de Litterature Potentielle or Oulipo (The Workshop of Potential Literature), a primarily French group organized around Raymond Queneau and primarily concerned with methods of creating new literary structures. Their ideas offer a welcome relief to the staid and stale conviction that literary forms have been handed down from the ancients along with the rest of language, as if structures like sonnets or mystery novels are as intrinsically a part of language as vowels or nouns.

These essays illuminate the limited ways that contemporary fiction approaches the idea of form. In the limited framework of the short story structure, readers find great variation and even invention, but the actual form of the story seems as rigid a language structure as the blues are a song structure, tirelessly repeating the AAB structure into infinity; I asked my captain for the time of day. I asked my captain for the time of day. He said hed thrown his watch away.

A writer who wants to be free needs to confront the constrictions and value of literary form. Yet, literary form seems to come out of a black box, so much so that writing that somehow confounds formats, like Lawrence Sternes Tristam Shandy or Edwin A. Abbotts Flatland or more recently Ben Marcuss The Age of Wire and String seems to be inspired but frivolous oddities rather than the result of a literary method. The Oulipo, however, have developed a method for subverting expectations and for being as creative with form as writers are expected to be with content. Franáois Le Lionnais writes in the Second Oulipo Manifesto, Should humanity lie back and be satisfied to watch new thoughts make ancient verses?

Literature that satisfies a particular

form fulfills the esthetic aims of that form. For instance, the novel developed several hundred years ago as a result of an expanded middle class audience. The form typically follows a protagonists conflict with society and in the end the protagonist either achieves some kind of reconciliation with society or dies; the form of the novel performs as both a platform for an anarchic point of view but also reassures its audience that eccentricity will be absorbed in the end. A sonnet straps language into iambic pentameter, a straight jacket rhyme scheme, and limits the subject to a single sentiment. The Poetry Handbook includes this rule for the sonnet, Groups of sonnets using the same form and relate to the same theme, which is often love of a women or the love of God. The inherent value of the form exerts a hidden force on the content of the work. Form functions like a medium and in this sense limits the range of meaning expressed by language just as wood grain limits

the direction of the carved line in a wood block.

By building mazes and trying to escape them, the Oulipo have started a dialogue about ways to imagine new literary structures. By building artificial rules the Oulipo have escaped the prison of old forms.

Founded in late 1960 in France, at a colloquium on the work of Raymond Queneau, in order to research new writing by combining mathematics and literature (and also to just horse around) the Oulipo soon expanded to include all writing using self-imposed restrictive systems. The group didnt publicly publish until 1973, La Litterature Potentielle. The best known of the groups work are Italo Calvinos If on a winters night a traveler and Georges Perecs Life: A Users Manual. A truncated role call of the more familiar names includes: Noël Arnaud, Italo Calvino, Ross Chambers, Stanley Chapman, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Fournal, Franáois Le Lionnais, Harry Matthews, Georges Perec, and Raymond Queneau.

Oulipo contains the critical writings of the Oulipo, including Franáois Le Lionnaiss Manifestoes, a history of the Lipogram by Georges Perec, and Jacques Roulaurds explanation of the mathematical method of Raymond Queneau. Reading the critical writing gives a foundation in the method and the nature of the groups experiment. Jean Lescures Brief History of the Oulipo chronicles the formulation of the group as an formally informal gathering of mathematicians and writers who began to apply mathematical formulas to literary forms. The end matter of the book contains a thorough bibliography of the principal Oulipo players and their work.

Raymond Queneaus Cent Mille Millards de Poems (One hundred thousand billion poems), expresses the Oulipian ideal. It is a series of ten sonnets contrived so that each line of each sonnet can be replaced with any corresponding line of the other ten sonnets, sort of like a sonnet version of one of those childrens flip-books where you can change the head of animals. The possibilities put forth by this arrangement would be to the order of 1014, one hundred trillion sonnets. The potential text explodes into an incomprehensible size. According to [Queneaus] calculations, if one read a sonnet per minute eight hours a day, two hundred days per year, it would take more than a million centuries to finish the text.

The Oulipo seem to be most interested in discovering how to express literature by limiting the writers choices, either by the construction of mathematical formulas that produce results, formal constraints and rules that produces results, or language games that produce results, in this sense I mean results as in the result of an equation. The lipogram, where a single letter is stricken from the text, is an ancient exercise the Oulipians have appropriated for their toolbox. Ideally, each Oulipian structure would result in one potential literature, not necessarily a single text because The One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems is a single potential literature, but nearly an infinite text. For a writer, drafting an Oulipian work should be more like filling out a crossword puzzle or doing calculus homework then an act of inspiration. The muse has had her hard drive reformatted and inspiration is not to be trusted.

To practitioners approaching writing as a craft, as if the writing of stories was along the lines of knitting sweaters, this exploration seems at best frivolous and maybe a little pretentious if all you want to do is make sweaters. However, these are useful generative tools. Not only do they provide a developed handbag of new literary forms, but these tools also establish a solid framework for developing a criticism about literary structure. This book is a vital and concise introduction to the Oulipian technique.

I was so happy to find this book after thinking that 'Claudine and Annie' of the four Claudine books was the last we could read of her. In this book, Colette expands upon the friendship between Claudine and Annie, and shows what becomes of the latter's timid personality and what stepson Marcel has developed into. But Claudine is the same delightful Claudine, who writes of pain, of friendship, of personal relationships, of nature, of animals freely now, uninhibited by society. For how flowing and relaxing the book reads, there are some major changes to the plot, most noticably in the end. A lovely book for anyone who wants to keep up with Claudine, or who enjoys the later works of Colette.

Prepare to read something you are not prepared for. This book will send you into realms of storytelling that seem impossible even as you read them. Cavort with "beings" who are present at the beginning of the universe and the big bang; be present at the moment someone (or something) plays with "a thing" for the first time. A review cannot do this book justice. It is utterly mind-blowing, beautiful, funny, and profound all at the same time. The writing is crystal clear (even in translation), which adds to the book's mystique. One of the best things about this book is the sheer impossibility of making a movie out of it. It exploits the best of what written stories can give us: imagination and the freedom to evoke our own mental imagery. The images floating through my head while I read this defy description. The stories themselves defy description (as I found out when trying to convince others to read it). Why can't more books be like this?

I have never read a book quite like this one. It is definitely not a novel, in as much as there is not a set beginning, middle, climax and denouement, nor one or more characters that we follow throughout the book in a series of adventures and incidents. While the book contains a dozen short stories with a common link that may be described as science fiction, I would not call it strictly a book of this genre.

"Cosmicomics" may instead be described as a series of beautifully and imaginatively written poetic fables that defy time and space. They take place prior to, during and after the galaxies and the universe were formed, throughout myriad evolutionary cycles, prior to the birth of mankind, and even ante-dating the beginning of what is commonly called life. These tales concern atoms, molecules and other worldly beings interacting, almost interacting, and even repelling one another while travelling between gravitational and anti-gravitational forces. They may be floating around in space, chasing each other or being chased at one and the same time. There is a story of betting on the chance occurrances of historical, pre-historical, and pre-planetary incidents, and of lovers living in a time before colors, when black, white and shades of gray were the natural order of things. There is a wondrous tale of a time during the formation of the universe, when the earth and the moon abutted one another and people utilized a ladder to climb from the earth to the moon to spoon out milk. One of the most beautiful of these parables concerns the last dinosaur to survive on earth and his relationship and near love affair with one of the new ones. This is truly a book to cherish.

It's a wonderful, fantastic book, which discribes the evolution of the Universe as a spinning journey throught time, in which playing marbles with hydrogen atoms or arguing in The Dot is obidient for the characters. It shows the Universe in such a way, that I think this book is one of the reasons for which I chose my future profession. Those are not ordinary fairy tales, they are tales of us, of our playful nature, as the characters take life as it is. On of the most beautiful stories is the moon one. The moon slowly drifts away from Earth while they are rowing to it every night and collecting Moon-milk... True charm and fantazy.

A new italian Futurist Manifesto, but this time a good one.

It was a an Italian virtuoso contrabassist who told me to read these Lectures. Stefano plays all the arduously difficult new music literature for the contrabass. He travels with a violoncello,so he can play all that repertoire as well. When he plays this music he often ponders Calvino, five primary conceptual corridors toward what he thought of as literature,but music as well can be contemplated with these ideas. "Lightness", well music has a density, Mozart played games with it, and interpreting Mozart can be a treatise in the dialectic,the transformations and timbral modulations of lightness to heaviness.,ask any violinist.Calvino of course expounds on Kundera's popular book, on the weight of the lifeworld of living in the East,the coal-dusted passageways,or of a fallen love,begun transgressivly there as well. Dante is a frequent pilgrim(example) here the lightness of snow falling imperceptibly on the mountainside. "Quickness", but not how fast things move,(our Silicon Valley) odious airjets that may puncture the ozone layer,or violins, but the quickness of an image to transform our consciousness,to lighten it up from the cruel oppression of citylife.That's poetry. I think.Robert Musil is here as well, the complexity,the numbering imagination of his transitory work to modernity the opening two decades of this century,his "Man Without Qualities" a seemingly endless work.And Gedda's "Awfull Mess. . . " on the street a probing detective novel of complexity of a murder in Rome,on the way to the Labor Bureau of the Roman Government. In music I frequently think of Visibility when I have nothing to transport me into the bowels of a Bruckner or an Antheil Symphony,what do I see in the music,like the weight of this century in the "Largo" from the "Fifth Symphony" of Shostakovich.Multiplicity as well another Calvino chapter is here,sprouting its wings like a peacock, all around us if we only have the patience for it. To phanthom and explore all images of a work as looked at through a plexiglass. We seldom do that. How exact is art, "Exactitude" is what Leonardo di Vinci lived his life with, rewrote almost everything,Calvino tells us, as Leopardi,the Essays.

My interest in reading this collection of essays stems from a curiousity about narrative structure. I found that, while Calvino writes candid insertions about his own works, and while he writes with great fluency of ancient, medieval, contemporary world writers, the power of this short book lies in his erudite observations and keen, bits of wisdom. Here's a sample: "Saving time is a good thing because the more time we save, the more we can afford to lose" (p. 46), and this one, "Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would choose this one: The sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times--noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring--belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetary for rusty, old cars" (p. 12).

Calvino writes about five different qualities of literature: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity (he had intended to write a sixth chapter on Consistency, before his untimely death). He examines these qualities closely, using his own facile language as the medium.

Read it, by all means.

These are wonderful novellas. Written as fables, there appeal lies on one level as simple fictional tales about knights and castles, so it could be something that children could enjoy quite easily. From there, it grows. Calvino packs so much wisdom and inquisitiveness into these stories, that it takes on the form of a metaphysical inquiry into morality, epistomology, and science. In "The Nonexistent Knight," the penultimate hollow man shuffles through Charlemagne's Europe maintaining some kind of external order, at least. That's all he has to offer to the world, of course, because there is nothing inside the shell. Don't you know people like that?

Then in "The Cloven Viscount," a parable in an ethical style, Calvino splits a person in two and takes the reader on the journey of exploring all the ramifications of that fissure.

I believe these could be taught in a philosophy course, a literature course, read at the bedside with junior, and taken to the beach for summer reading, and an easy book to talk about at a dinner party or in a book group.

"The Nonexistent Knight", the "Cloven Viscount" and "The Baron in the Trees" are often referred to as "the fantasy trilogy" of Calvino. If anything, they show that there are still writers able to invent timeless tales. In this respect, Calvino is a modern-time heir of H.C.Handersen, with the only difference that Calvino is a writer of greater narrative range: he can spin a yarn on infinite variations of folk tales and write a symmetry-obsessed novel like "The castle of Crossed Destinies". The trilogy is written in a linear style that is lyrical and simple. I read them in italian in my 4th grade, and loved them. I picked them again 20 years later and loved them even more (esp. The Cloven Viscount). The stories touch upon themes like friendship, love, identity, freedom. It's hard to dislike them.

Before it became mandatory for my eleventh grade English class to read these novellas, I had no idea who Italo Calvino was. Even after I bought the books special order, they sat on my shelf until the time when the teacher assigned them. But upon opening the front cover, I realized how much inspiration had been hiding in my own bedroom for four weeks and I was instantly sorry. The story of the nonexistant knight was so well written and eloquent in language and style, I instantly fell in love with the author. I encourage anyone to explore Calvino's world.

The verse of Ligurian poet Giuseppe Conte is finally available to an English-language audience with THE OCEAN AND THE BOY, Laura Stortoni's translation of his 1983 book "L'oceano e il ragazzo." Conte is one of the most striking poets in Italian literature of the second half of the 20th century, and he has fused Ligurian hermeticism with a deep concern for the natural world.

Giuseppe Conte's poetry is always aware of the fact that Nature remains the foundation and background for any civilization, even though she may be easily forgotten. He writes of how Mediterranean civilizations are all intricately linked with their common setting of sand and ocean, and the "I" in Conte's poetry is often linked to flora and fauna. In "After March" he writes, "I want only to bloom, to live again,I,/no longer I, but hibiscus, acacia." Conte's fascination with how Man remains connected to the land makes him an interesting European counterpart to the Native-American poet Ray A. Youngbear.

Giuseppe Conte is learned in English literature and admires the works of D.H. Lawrence and Walt Whitman. As he writes in his introduction to this English edition, his thoughts have often been directed west to the Americas, and in fact he has travelled to the U.S. several times after the publication of "L'oceano e il ragazzo." In several places here, such as "The Conquest of Mexico," his poetry deals with the Aztec gods, metaphors for a natural world that remains even after the religion that personified its aspects has become extinct.

I can't comment much on Stortoni's translation of Conte's Italian, as I read the Italian text in this facing-page translation. However, I have glanced at her translation and it seems relatively faithful, although as a non-native speaker of English she does make occasionally idiosyncratic choices of phrase. Nonetheless, she deserves praise for making the work of the fascinating poet accessible to the English-language reader. She has also translated Maria Luisa Spaziani's SENTRY TOWERS into English and is certainly doing a great service for English speakers.

While not as intensely sublime as the poetry of Giuseppe Montale, a much more famous Ligurian who won the Nobel prize in 1975, and not as influential as the works of Quasimodo or Ungaretti, the poetry of Giuseppe Conte is certainly worth a look. His use of modern style while reaching back to the dawn of Mediterranean civilization is truly moving.

Book Review: "The Ocean and the Boy"

"The Ocean and the Boy" is a wonderful compilation of Italian poetry written by Giuseppe Conte and translated by Laura Stortoni. Conte's poems touch on many themes, from pre-Colombian Mexico, to his childhood, to Greek mythology. My favorite theme, though, one that runs consistently through Conte's poetry, is the theme of Nature. Conte spends many lines either intricately describing the flora and fauna that surrounds him, or defining himself in terms of Nature: "I want only to bloom, to revive, I,/ no longer I, but hibiscus, acacia. . ." Of particular interest to me were his poems about the sea, including "What Was the Sea?", "You Should Have Heard the Wind", and "The Ocean and the Boy Walk...." I love the way Conte describes the ocean of his childhood: "It had/ tails and paws of water among the/ rocks, it polished the pebbles, it made. Cyphers of light on the sand: it was/ deep but unfeeling, they said, and celibate, individual, sterile." and "the wind/ of the sea, lifting the waves, tearing up/ the clouds and reweaving them. . ." These poems spoke to me because as a child that had the good fortune to grow up near the sea, Conte made me recall my own experiences: warnings of the oceans unpredictable behavior and the terror I felt (and still sometimes feel in my nightmares) that the huge mass of blue would swallow me up if I waded in too deeply. Yet, one does not have to have had to experience the sea as a child to appreciate these poems, only an understanding of the ocean as a metaphor for incomprehensible and seemingly endless vastness. In "The Ocean and the Boy Walk" Conte presents the ocean as a metaphor for his mind or unconscious, Conte IS the ocean, the ocean (his unconscious) even speaks for him when he cannot "The Boy is mute, the Ocean cries/ far-off cries,...the Ocean does not keep silent, no,/ the Boy descending, knows/ there is a voice, deeper than the darkness. . ." The layout of this book is as equally as impressive as the poetry contained within. Each original poem is presented with the English translation on the opposite page, giving the reader the opportunity to reference as they please. Having the poems side by side makes this book perfect for those interested in learning Italian or learning how to translate from Italian to English, or vice versa, regardless of the reader's level. Printing the Italian is also a credit to the translator, Laura Stortoni, for this forces her to be extremely true to the original poem. That aside, credit is due to her just for the simple fact that now those who are not literate in Italian have the opportunity to enjoy Conte's poetry. When I was studying for my B.A. in Spanish Literature I came to realize just how important it was to experience the literature of other cultures. And of course no translation, no matter how accurate, can compare with the original, but reading a translated version is better than nothing at all. I also began to understand that what makes a good novelist, playwright, or poet, are those can reach an audience beyond their own culture. This is the type of poet Conte is: universal. This book of poetry is filled with poems that can speak to any human once the barrier of language has been broken down. I highly recommend it.

A poetry lover from Santa Barbara, CA

Translator's Comments By Laura Anna Stortoni

Translating, From the Latin, transferre, means, in simple words, to carry something from one place to another. The literary translator carries words, the heaviest of all burdens, from one language to another. But the very act of choosing a certain poem is, first of all, a profession of identification. A remote, often arcane, reason strikes a special inner chord in the translator's soul, giving him/her no peace until the original poem is eaten, chewed, absorbed and finally regurgitated in the other language, having become fiber of the fiber, flesh of the flesh, of the translator. After translating a poem, I often think of it as mine. If I wanted to translate it in the first place, it was a poem I should have written myself. Giancarlo Pontiggia says that the literary translator should simply go where the text orders him to go, letting himself be carried away. I have always trusted my mysterious illuminations far more than the painstaking thirteen drafts that some have recommended for literary translators. While translating Giuseppe Conte's poetry, the "carrying" of the verses was light, spontaneous, with the English words magically appearing to my mind while I was reading the Italian text. This probably happened because Conte speaks of places I have seen, of feelings I have felt. The sea he describes was the sea where every summer I would roam those vast beaches, burnt by the sun and vexed by the winds.

Conte is as possessed by the sea as I am. The sea invades us, pervades us, in the same way that it pervades the poetry of Salvatore Quasimodo and of the Greek poets Elytis and Seferis. As I read Conte's poetry, I saw; and as I saw, the images translated themselves into English without any apparent effort on my part. This is the magic wrought by the poetry that strikes our arcane inner chords. The sea described in this volume is seen with the wonder of a child's eyes, a wonder akin to that of Homeric heroes. It is the "wine-colored sea" described by Homer, a sea fighting and loving, with unpredictable alternation, the earth and the beach, a sea that attempts to conquer, to devour, to attack, to then retreat in peace and soothing calm. The landscapes and seascapes described here are mythical and yet precise: for myths are never general, rather, they emerge from a complexity of details. Conte mentions specific names of local flora and fauna, describes the lush, precarious hills sloping towards the sea, attracted to the waves and yet threatened by them, just as we humans are attracted to danger. This landscape/seascape, sketched with the detailed technique of a naif painter, is a precise childhood memory acquiring the haunting proportions of myth. These memories deserve to be carried and be recorded into another language, so that they can also affect those who cannot read the original. And so I translated them. As a translator, I often feel, humbly, that I have opened a door so that others can enter. Please come in.