Tuesday Book Review

Five-star review of Six Memos for the Next Millenium by Italo  Calvino

 There are only five memos or rather lectures that Calvino wrote in 1985 but never was able to deliver due to his untimely death. They cover what he calls literary values of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity in a far-ranging references to literature, myth and folklore. A sixth was added in the class I attended by the writer running the course. The titles of each section could have been something broader because the content covered so many aspects of each word. Perhaps better titles would have been weight, pacing, precision, imagination or vision, and proliferation. There’s so much to unpack in this little book. I’ll have to reread it to get the bits I didn’t the first time around.