Volume 47, Number 4 · March 9, 2000
Eyes Wide Open
By Michael Wood
Why Read the Classics?
by Italo Calvino, Translated from the Italian by Martin McLaughlin
Pantheon, 278 pp., $26.00
Italo Calvino has become such a canonical writer in Italy that he can be attacked as a mere classic—or at least the view of literature he represents can be attacked as a dead or empty classicism, out of touch with the sprawling and provocative impurities of life. This is the drift of a recent book by Carla Benedetti.[1] Why Read the Classics?, a collection of Calvino's essays which appeared in Italian in 1991, seems, at first sight, to confirm the diagnosis. Why should we read the classics? 'The only reason that can be adduced in their favour,' Calvino mildly says, 'is that reading the classics is better than not reading them.' It doesn't seem much of an answer, more like the wave of a toy pistol in the already fading culture wars. But there is a good deal more to Calvino than this—more even to that easy-seeming sentence—as indeed there was more to the culture wars than the opposition between old dead writers (magnificent or oppressive) and new or neglected ones (liberating or meretricious).
Review, 3325 words
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