I've read a lot of folktales since childhood, and this is the one book that I love the most. There is something magic in the way these stories go, the way they were told by such a great writer as Italo Calvino, who was almost awarded a Nobel Prize. Unfortunately he passed away the same year, so he couldn't get this award. But this great book will live on.

Calvino has been one of my all-time favorite writers ever since I encountered his masterpiece Invisible Cities. Much of his fiction experiments intricately--and successfully--with the conventions of storytelling. Italian Folktales, though, reveals a completely different dimension of Calvino. These stories are the fruit of painstaking ethnographic and archival research, retold by a master storyteller. In addition to being a collection of enchanting stories, the book also gives the reader tremendous insight into the life of the folktale. Elements of one story--characters, bits of dialogue, and in some cases even considerable fragments of plot--surface in another story time and time again. Calvino has also left some of the warts untouched--every now and then a story is obviously truncated, forgets to mention what becomes of an important character, or completely switches plot halfway through. Somehow these are very satisfying things to notice. Other nice touches include the introduction, where the author discusses how he collected the stories, and the attribution of each story to a specific region of Italy.

The translation is good, though I wish I could read Italian!

I was first given this book at age 5, and since then have gone through 4 copies. I've read it so often that I know all the stories by heart, and still keep reading. The tales are beautifully written and edited, and cover religion, love, feats of greatness, and foolish acts. For any lover of the folktale/fairytale genre, this book is a must have. I would recommend buying the hardback version, because if you love it like me -- the binding will fall apart after the first 3 or 4 reads.

What is love in the modern ages and what happens while modern people lives or searches for love. Calvino has always looked at the things from unexpected sides so here is an interesting book

Calvino is a genius. I read most of his books and all are differents in style, thematic, lenght, etc; but all are similar in quality, humanity and sensibility.

This one is a collection of stories where love is only a component, an important one but not the only (as in real life). Even is not the usual love that it is important here. Reaction to love, moments before love, lonely love are the esential components of these stories.

Calvino knows that it is not possible write about love, we can only describe the environment of love, but not LOVE. But when you are able to write about it with the class of Calvino, you do not need anymore.

Excellent, excellent and excellent

Life is about stories. Italo Calvino has (had) a true ability to bring you "into the detail" of life. The stories are set before you to experience yourself. Many stories which we long for in our own lives, many which we would never wish to know.

This book enables you to feel the soil, smell the sea, sense the fear...the details that not so many other authors can bring to you.

I had the good fortune to read "Invisible Cities" while in Venice and other parts of Northern Italy, where I felt like I was visiting many of the cities described in the book. This book is a tiny little gem collection, with descriptions of each city stretching your brain in a different direction. However, I do feel that some of the chapters are repetitive, particularly on the theme of cities that contain their opposites. For that, I have taken away one star in my review. It reminded me very much of Alan Lightman's book "Einstein's Dreams" which I would also recommend (he's no Calvino, but the format and brain-stretching are similar). My favorite Calvino book will forever remain "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler," which if you do not own you should immediately order a dozen copies and pass them out to everyone you know.

In this wonderful litle book, an imaginary Marco Polo tells an equally fictional Kublai Khan the story of his many travels through the Mogol Empire, and all the cities he has known. They both know it's all in Polo's brain, but who cares, the imaginary cities are so vivid, so visually possible, that the emperor keeps demanding more of them.

Calvino really lets his imagination get high, to create the most bizarre, beautiful, horrible and crazy cities as any you yourself can imagine. Cities of all places, ages, shapes and peculiarities come to your mind. Calvino is really good at depicting impossible places, but also places that somehow remind you of real cities you've been to.

A remarkable work of imagination, well written, this is the ideal book to read in a dreamy scenery, but also in one of these quasi-impossible cities we humans have created, the craziest ones, such as NY, LA, Tokyo, Mexico City, etc.

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that it is a sin to write a long book when the idea for it could be explained in a few pages. I don't entirely agree, and I doubt Italo Calvino did either, but from this book alone he certainly could have.

The reason I say this is because Invisible Cities consists purely of ideas. There is no plot and only two major characters, who are really not characters so much as plot devices. (Perhaps not plot devices, since I just wrote that their is no plot, but I think you understand.) There is only a series of thoughts on perception, memory, time, and many other topics, explained through a series of descriptions of fantastical cities. Sometimes the meanings of the cities are clear, but most contain various degrees of enigmaticism.

This book is short, but I don't recommend trying to read in one or a few days. It seems to work best if you read it a little at a time. My only real complaint with the book is that it seems to end arbitrarily rather than concluding. This is a brilliant book.

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 (The Ouvrior de LittÈrature Potentielle or Oulipo (The Workshop of Potential Literature)) expanded to include all writing using self-imposed restrictive systems.

Potential Literature, to me, seems an extension of Surrealism, which used the methods of literary production to critique modernism's obsession with the literary artifact; instead of the myth of the artist alone in some garret painstakingly crafting a Work of Art, literature is automatically generated by timed writing, or mechanically generated by multiple authors with games like the Exquisite Corpse or pieced together in a collage of found text. The Oulipo extends this the critique of modernism by exploring ways that literature can be produced as a result of mathematical formulas, or by building complex rules that limit writer's potential choices, or by the construction of new literary forms.

This book serves as a short introduction to the methods of potential literature several reprints from the groups pamphlet series, including François Le Lionnais's Manifestos and Italo Calvino's essay "How I Wrote One of My Books," which served as the blue print for If On a Winter's Nigh a Traveler.

Oulipo is a body of generative ideas rather than a critical or analytical method. It does away with philosophical underpinning in favor of just generating writing. Raymond Queneau regretted that writer's didn't use tools like other craftsmen. With word-processors, they do and this text supplies a range of techniques for extending mechanical writing beyond spell check. The muse has had her hard drive reformatted.

This book is a riot! I highly recommend it. All of the texts are funny but Fornel's Suburbia is the funniest produced yet by the Oulipians. In addition, this book is a good introduction to the aesthetics of Oulipo, a group of writers who are underappreciated by the American audience.

This novel, told from the perspective of the main character's younger brother, is the story of Cosimo, a young baron-to-be in 18th-century Italy who climbs a tree to defy his parents and never comes down. The magical nature of the story is compelling, and Calvino is a marvelous craftsman of fantasy. The book does have some flaws: I had fundamental problems with Cosimo's reasons for going into the tree in the first place and deciding to remain there; it seemed to me that he spent his life in the trees out of sheer stubbornness. This explanation, in the midst of a book that seemed to be trying to say something through Cosimo's wisdom, was unsatisfying for me. But the scenes which deal with human relationships are stunning in their truth (if not their objective reality), and the arboreal world Calvino creates is one that I'd like to see. One of my students recommended this book to me, and I am grateful to him for doing so. I'm somewhat at a loss to compare this book with anything else I've ever read--but I do recommend it.

the central conceit (someone who chooses to live in trees) is a good one, and is intelligently followed through. here we have the conflict between custom (nomos) and the natural law (physis), played out in a literal sense as the man-made house is abandoned for a life in the trees. what we are offered is a patchwork of stories that make up an unconventional life.

i progressed through the book slowly and found there to be little dramatic tension in it, the result, perhaps, of the author preferring the 'anecdotal' style of narrating; Calvino tells us how most of the episodes will end at the beginning of each episode. intensity is only really achieved in the complicated relationship between Cosimo and Viola, which is handled with great perceptiveness and literary skill. that said, there is plenty to enjoy in this book; tales of piracy, bandits, wars and philosophers.

the book contains some useful general insights too; Calvino is surely a prescient environmentalist when he tells us that the forests Cosimo inhabited throughout his life have been destroyed by "men who loved nothing, not even themselves".

overall, i thought that the ideas in this book were very modern, and that the author was extremely competent at evoking places, scenes, characters, etc. but the force of the work was slightly reduced for me by the anecdotal manner in which it was delivered.

Calvino is another of those writers I'd heard of, but would never have read had it not been for our book group's selection of this book. I'm glad to say that this is a tale enjoyable by children and adults alike, skillfully operating on several levels. The story concerns Cosimo, a noble born boy in late 18th-century Italy who one day defies his parents by climbing a tree and refusing to come back down. His life story is narrated by his younger brother, and Cosimo's adventures in the trees work both as charming tale for children, and as a metaphor for the Enlightenment for adults. Living among the treetops, Cosimo is seeking to distance himself from social traditions and norms while creating his own world and relationships. It obviously requires a little suspension of disbelief, but even those who normally hate magical realism (like me) will find it palatable. The cast of supporting characters are quirky and vividly entertaining, including his dog, militarist mother, disaster-in-the-kitchen sister, and exiled Spanish nobles. It's one of the most enjoyable (and short) piece of utopian literature I've encountered, and would make ripe reading for high school students.

Calvino can be hit or miss. You either love him or hate him. This book is truly one of his best. It is an interactive novel where the reader becomes one of the characters. If you have a strong need for resolution and don't like stories left to your imagination, don't read this book; you will be frustrated and disappointed. If you are a "traveler" in the sense where you have visited many places without leaving your home, if you enjoy the magical realism of Borges and Marquez, this book will thrill you and take you on a thought provoking ride.

This is a brilliant novel. Calvino has for me lived up to all the hype -- here is a book that is simultaneously a virtuoso display of story telling and mixed narrative modes, an exploration of the nature of meaning, an experiment in overall structure that pays off brilliantly... (Not often that a book makes you sound like a ... back-cover reviewer). I think this will turn out to be one of the most influential books I've read -- it left me sitting in an airport looking at the world as a sea of possibility waiting to explode.

(Oh, and if you are Other Reader -- get in touch? I'll be waiting in the bookstore...)

We recently read this book for a literary theory class, and it fascinated me so much that I found myself rereading it after having just finished. For anyone interested in theory, in language itself, in the origin of thoughts and ideas and how our perceptions shape the world, YOU MUST OWN THIS BOOK.

While other reviews I've read have ranked this as equivalent to a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, it is most likely because the effort wasn't prolonged enough to grasp Calvino's point, which is this: That we are taught what to expect and what to ask of our authors, and anything we read is falsified in an attempt to appeal to our tastes. The book consists of 10 novels, each begun, and never allowed closure, with a connecting story that ties in the search for the original authorship of these books, and the frustration at never being able to arrive at who the author is and discover the true meaning. Each attempt to begin anew ends with narrator yanking you from the story; by doing this Calvino steps out of the authorial role--he denies the book categorization by changing what is happening each time we expect something to specific to occur. He does this specifically because he does not want us to be in the mode of simply surveying information that we already have figured the path of. The book has no genre--it becomes its own, and our understanding of what we read, why we read and how we read is forever impacted. By denying himself access to shaping the novel, he requires the reader's complete attention in determining the ultimate outcome of the book.

I bought a used copy and ripped it to pieces rereading and underlining and now have to buy a new copy. If you have an open mind, this will definitely be a book you will not regret.

I was instead disappointed. I enjoyed Italo's Italian Folktakes so much that I thought this would be another endless read. Instead, I found it dry and methodical. While some of the stories were intriguing, the majority were immature works created by talented authors. Meaning, many of the stories just didn't have the direction, plot, or moral I expect from a "fantastic tale."

The stories collected in this volume span through some several hundred years and many languages. The authors represented wrote not only in the genre of the fantastic, they are recognized masters. But here we find their finest, eeriest, most bizarre and phantasmagoric tales. Reading through the book provides a real sense of the development of the ghost story and the fantasy through the years.

Perhaps of even greater importance, for those of us who are Calvino fans, we can see what stories the Italian fabulist cherished most, what he read and what influenced him. He places each book in a historical and literary context, and the opening essay is truly key to understanding Calvino's theories of the fantastic, which in themselves make this book worth buying!

All of us have wondered what postmodernism is but haven't dared to ask. By tracing the career of this noteworthy author we learn about him, his works, and the hows and whys of the present postmodern movement we live in.

A collection of 3 short stories. Each deals with one of the senses and were going to be part of a projected suite with, presumably, some kind of framing device. Calvino was one of those happy people that can write works that stretch the intellect without altogether sacrificing story, plot and characterisation. The middle tale ('A King Listens') is unsuccessful, ending up as nothing more than an experiment - who knows whether it would have improved had he time to revise it, it was the last thing he wrote before his death. But the opening and closing stories are much better, especially the latter ('The Name, The Nose'), although still not prime Calvino (try 'Adam One Afternoon', 'Invisible Cities' or 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller' if you're new to the writer and want to know what his talents can *really* produce). 'Under the Jaguar Sun', the title story set in Mexico, deals with taste and develops the idea of human relationships as a form of canibalism in which we digest our partner to taste their thoughts, feelings, desires and wishes in order to make them part of ourselves. 'The Name, The Nose' takes three characters (a Proustian aesthete, a prehistoric apeman on the verge of walking upright and a drug-addled rock musician) that are all in love with an unknown woman identifiable only by her scent, eventually discovering that she has died since making love with them. Despite the differences in the characters, their tales are interlinked surpringly smoothly and satisfyingly. However, due to its posthumous nature, the book is very short, only 83 pages of big type, and so can only be recommended to Calvino fans.

This book collects three of Calvino's last stories, originally planned to be a set of five, each focused on one of the five senses. One of the world's most original and sensitive storytellers, he will be solely missed.

"Under the Jaguar Sun" presents a married couple whose vacation in Mexico is punctuated by the powerful flavors of the local cuisine. Before the trip is over they discover that the spicy food whets their appetite for passion as well as for dining. In "A King Listens" the proud ruler, constrained by the obligations and dangers of his office, finds his only real source of information is his hearing. The ambient sounds of his palace, and the voices inside his own head are all that he can depend on. Finally, "The Name, the Nose" shows us a collage of desperate swains trying to seek out a woman whom they can identify only by her fragrance. As in "Jaguar" Calvino touches on the relationship between the senses and sexual desire, but this tale also carries a different message - one that seems to hint darkly at the author's own coming demise.

For those unfamiliar with the work of this master of postmodern literature, these three stories are probably not the best introduction. The quiet intensity of Calvino's voice is there, and his style is as pristine as ever, almost a prose poetry; but while the stories feature at least a couple of genuine surprises, they fall short of the knockout power that distinguishes his very best work. By focusing so strongly on the senses, he underplays what are probably his greatest strengths - in-depth logical analysis and exquisitely ironic humor. Fans will surely appreciate one last opportunity to experience Calvino's skill, but others should probably start with one of his more revolutionary works if they want to see why he is so greatly admired.

I'm a Calvino mark. Simply said, I love the man's writing! This, however, is a mixed bag, in my opinion. A truly interesting theme (stories about the senses) the only one I really liked was the story dealing with the sense of smell ("The Man, The Nose" I believe.) Its not that the others weren't imaginative or beautifully crafted, but I just felt as if something didn't click for me. The first two tales about the sense of taste and the sense hearing were a little too... self-indulgent, perhaps? It is somewhat difficult to articulate. All in all, this is suitable more for the true Calvino fan, rather than as an introduction or the casual reader. The one lasting impression I drew from the collection was, "What about sight and touch?" Maybe next time around.

... but I'm such an avid Tarot fan that I still recommend this to others who want to see his treatment of the subject.
Naturally, the Tarot is interpretated differently by almost everyone who indulges. But, hey!... that's the point of studying it as far as I'm concerned.

Definitely check this one out!

As a tarot cards reader, I really loved this book.

The book contain two similar stories - a group of people meet in an isolated place, and having lost the ability to speak, tell their stories using tarot cards.

I've found the stories interesting as examples of story telling with tarot cards, though going through the idea a second time in the second story didn't make as interesting a reading as the first story.

Regretably, the Hebrew translation contains poor reproductions of the decks with which the stories are told, which is doubly sad considering how beutiful the Visconti-Sforza deck is. As the first edition went out of print, I hope an improved second edition will be printed soon...

I'm a beginner at reading Italian literature, but there's a few amusing things Calvino did here...he took pivotal scenes from classic literature that includes the poetic epic Bordering on Love and characters of Shakesphere, works of Renaissance literature, and rematched them to the minature art of the time, tarocchi game cards.
I recognize excerpts of human passions from the poetry epic of Bordering on Love from Maria Matteo Boiardo, the Fererra count, poet and storyteller for the D'Estes clan in the 1470s in the Castle of Crossed Destinies. Calvino also took parts of the Arthurian romantic tales that Boiardo, Aristo and other courtly poets and 'rematched' them to the trump and other cards of the classic Italian tarocchi. I say rematched, as Boiardo and other poets/artists of D'Estes family members did allegorical praising in their poems or paintings that included direct or thinly disguised praises to their patrons. The patrons appear as romantic heroes amid Greco-Roman, Arthurian or other mythic landscapes. The D'Estes and Visconti-Sforzas were related through marriages and both sets of families have historical tarocchi card sets---but it is the "completed" set from the Milanese Visconti-Sforzas that we are familiar with now.
I'm still working through courses in humanities, but I thought that I recognized a few of the fictional scenes that Calvino presented from Renaissance sources.