Lezioni americane: sei proposte per il prossimo millennio = Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo CalvinoSix Memos for the Next Millennium is a book based on a series of lectures written by Italo Calvino for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, but never delivered as Calvino died before leaving Italy. The lectures were originally written in Italian and translated by Patrick Creagh. The lectures were to be given in the fall of 1985, and Memos was published in 1988. The memos are lectu...

This is a series of lectures and in each of them Calvino takes it upon himself to recommend to the next millennium a particular literary value which he holds dear, and has tried to embody in his work. That way this book becomes not only a manifesto on how to write but also a guide to interpreting Calvino’s writings. 1) Lightness: not frivolity but a lightness of touch that allows the writer and reader to soar above the paralyzing heaviness of the world.2) Quickness: the mental speed of the narra...

(English review at the bottom)Per spiegarvi perché bisognerebbe leggere questo saggio a tutti, anche a chi di letteratura non gliene importa e non ne mastica, userò una citazione, una soltanto.Siamo nella prima lezione, Leggerezza. Uno degli emblemi di questo valore per Calvino è il Cavalcanti protagonista della novella VI,9 del Decameron, un personaggio silenzioso, solitario, un personaggio, anche, che all'inizio della novella in questione sembra molte cose, ma non leggero: è un intellettuale,

Let's start with the fact that Italo Calvino is one of my favorite writers of all time. His crystalline surrealism, easy tone (at least in translation), and whimsical subjects (by which I mean situations and characters, inclusive) are, to me, compelling. To say that I went into this book with a favorable view of the author would be a gross understatement. I absolutely adore Calvino's work.Now, I am also discovering that I don't really like many books about writing. Moorcock's Death is No Obstacl...

What a pleasure it was to spend time in the company of Calvino, chatting to me like an erudite and engaging friend, expounding on his ideas about literary composition as I rode the bus or train (I refrained from reading 'Six Memos' when at the wheel of my car). Along the way, he shared extensive extracts from some of his favourite writers and it was fun to catch the cadences of the original Italian, German and French. It was a melancholy journey too. The five essays here were prepared by Sig. C

Calvino's lectures, prepared but not delivered late in his career, are just as thought-provoking as his fiction. He discusses some key, broad aspects of literature, and his personal discoveries of certain propulsive forces in writing. His discussion of Multiplicity I found most interesting, and the way he categorized encyclopedic and plural texts. It will certainly aid your understanding if you are already familiar with Flaubert, Gadda, Balzac, Ovid, Dante, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Mann, Goethe,

I would not be so drastic. I think we are always searching for something hidden or merely potential or hypothetical, following its traces whenever they appear on the surface. I think our basic mental processes have come down to us through every period of history, ever since our Paleolithic forefathers, who were hunters and gatherers. The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an aby...

INTERVIEWER: What place, if any at all, does delirium have in your working life? ITALO CALVINO: Delirium? . . . Let’s assume I answer, I am always rational. Whatever I say or write, everything is subject to reason, clarity, and logic. What would you think of me? You’d think I’m completely blind when it comes to myself, a sort of paranoiac. If on the other hand I were to answer, Oh, yes, I am really delirious; I always write as if I were in a trance, I don’t know how I write such crazy

Calvino is just so effortlessly wonderful. He and literature have a very intimate relationship and she tells him secrets about herself that no one else gets to hear. Until now! Calvino spills the beans on what are the qualities he feels are most important to the literature of the future: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity.I think my favorites were lightness and multiplicity considering that quickness, exactitude, and visibility seem to be very self-evidently positive

This is a series of lectures on literature and art--he weaves in themes of light, speed, vision, and uses mythology, poetry, and literature to talk about great writing and art. The lectures are so very well written and well-thought out. I will be coming back to them again and again.

Was this occasionally confusing? Yes yes it was. Was I also reading this like 10 pages ago and falling asleep bc I was attempting to read it while tired before bed? Yes yes I did. Fun and thoughtful. I agree with a lot of what he has to say. But I should probably have been more awake to read this ngl

Italo Calvino, given the meticulousness and conceptual cohesion of his storytelling, is an unsurprisingly lucid theorist as well. Among his final works, these five essays were drawn from lectures he he was prevented from delivering by his death in 1985, each covering a different literary trait he most valued. (A 6th was never written down.) Equally ordered and discursive, each offers insight into Calvino's writing (though much of it this is self-evident in the writing, as well), commentary on li...

I've had the uncanny experience of having read this book around when it came out and forgotten most of it, yet rereading it is sort of like being under hypnosis, as it essentially embodies a great deal of what I strive for in my own aesthetic and weltanschauung and how I prepare food and live when you get down to it. In his ode to lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity, Calvino dazzles in his apparently effortless incorporation of all of these qualities, even while admitt...

After posting a couple grumbling reviews, I owe the world of authors some gratitude. I first read Calvino's little book in 1988 and periodically I pick it up and read parts of it again. Six Memos are actually five lectures – illuminating the qualities Calvino most valued in fiction: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity. What's almost miraculous is that Calvino's lectures are perfect examples of the virtues he celebrates – graceful, amused, lustrous with civilized intelli...

It sounds weird and slightly retarded to say it, but Calvino was good with words.Revisiting a great many themes he discussed in The Uses of Literature, he breaks down what he values in reading and writing, and shows examples of the qualities he admires. Throughout, he's an entirely witty, charming commentator. I mean, the categories for literature that he espouses sometimes seem a wee bit arbitrary, but I didn't really care. He makes his case and makes it well.

Thank you to my kid brother Simon for the rec

LightnessI have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies. Sometimes from citiesAt certain moments I felt that the entire world was turning into stoneWith myths, one should not be in a hurryIt is better to let them settle into the memoryIt is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardwareThe iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bitsQuicknessDeath is hidden in clocksTristram Shandy d...

This book contains many insightful passages on the nature of how literature shapes the world around us, and ultimately our identity. “My discomfort arises from the loss of form that I notice in life, which I try to oppose with the only weapon I can think of, an idea of literature” Why it is important to be able to fantasize those things greater than the self, and if this greater collective of ideas and reference points creates a novel of multiplicity or simply confusion. How the use of language...

I just had the nasty experience of writing a review of this book which Goodreads lost somewhere between the moons of Uranus and the neighborhood of Alpha Centauri. Phoooey!To summarize briefly, Italo Calvino chooses six (actually five) traits he would like to see carried forward into a millennium which, alas, he did not live to see.It almost doesn't matter what these traits are: It only matters that Calvino took all of literature and examined it through his jeweler's loupe, showing us new relati...

So good. Not gonna pull any quotes or really sum anything up here. I think my friends would all like this book.

Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity are the five memos Calvino completed for the 1985-86 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. He died before completing the sixth memo, Consistency. The five we have are gems, and hopeful ones at that: "My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it," he writes in a prefatory note, and proceeds to describe the qualities he values in

Calvino nails it: "It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty--that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances. At

That's one of the best books I ever read about writing.

a trove!!!!!!! a trove

"...Literature is the Promised Land in which language becomes what it really ought to be...."

I need some time to grasp the whole thing.I'm sure this is one of those books that I'll be looking back at every six month or something...Calvino is an amazing "reader".One of the virtues of this book is that you get familiar with some excellent books you've never heard of.The book gets a little bit vague sometimes but I decided to ignore it and enjoy the context."Six memos..." is consisted of actually five lectures on:Lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility , multiplicity and the last lect...

"Six memos for the next Millennium" by Italo Calvino is a collection of five Charles Eliot Norton Lectures written in 1985/1986 about what should be cherished in literature with intriguing titles:1 – Lightness,2 – Quickness,3 – Exactitude,4 – Visibility,5 – Multiplicityand the never written memo "6 – Consistency".In my opinion these lectures transcend “Goodreads”, these lectures are a must-reads for every serious writer and reader!The third memo by Italo Calvino – Exactitude – begins as follows:...

Six Memos represents the English translations of essays on literature prepared by Italo Calvino for the Eliot Norton Lectures. Tragically, Calvino died a few months before delivering his discussions, but the existing manuscript was discovered by his widow, Esther, “all in perfect order, in the Italian original, on his writing desk ready to be put into his suitcase.” Completed herein are five of the six “memos”: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity with Consistency being...

Re-read, slowly, after many years. A slim book about meditations on literary values, full of poignant little stories. The themes are: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility and Multiplicity. In the Quickness chapter Calvino talks about the 'object of power' as protagonist, and about repeated situations, phrases and formulas, as so often found in fairy tales. He considers the importance of difference, not blunting but sharpening differences. He offers examples from literature regarding vast...

Believe me i have not read any of Calvino fictions works till now.This is my first read.I really loved it for the very reason for the play of dialectics.He never talks about weight instead he talk about lightness, similarly [Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity]. As with many authors he never use the code of mysticism, instead indulge in scientific theories to prove his point. That is the factor which interested me, gives the hope that these things are possible.