Commenting in the
New York Times Book Review, for example, novelist John Gardner called Calvino "one of the world's best fabulists." Although he wrote in what Patchy Wheatley referred to in the
Listener as a "dazzling variety of fictional styles," his stories and novels were all fables for adults. Gore Vidal noted in a
New York Review of Books essay that because Calvino both edited and wrote fables he was "someone who reached not only primary school children . . . but, at one time or another, everyone who reads." And for Franco Ricci, writing in the
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Calvino was not simply about fables. "Calvino has long been recognized," Ricci wrote, "as one of the most prominent writers of the twentieth century. At once experimental and accessible, he is able to fuse sophisticated narrative techniques with pleasurable storytelling."
Calvino's theory of literature, established very early in his career, dictated his use of the fable. For Calvino, to write any narrative was to write a fable. In Guide to Contemporary Italian Literature: From Futurism to Neorealism, Sergio Pacifici quoted a portion of Calvino's 1955 essay "Il midollo del leone" ("The Lion's Marrow") in which the novelist wrote: "The mold of the most ancient fables: the child abandoned in the woods or the knight who must survive encounters with beasts and enchantments remains the irreplaceable scheme of all human stories."
To understand Calvino, therefore, one must first understand the fable.
This is a free page. This page contains 194 words. This
biography contains 3,886 words (approx. 13 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Italo Calvino Access Pass.
