Volume 35, Number 14 · September 29, 1988
A Master's Legacy
By Brad Leithauser
Mr. Palomar
by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, 130 pp., $4.95 (paper)
Six Memos for the Next Millennium
by Italo Calvino, translated by Patrick Creagh
Harvard University Press, 144 pp., $12.95
In the courtroom of the literary journal, book reviewers should rarely be permitted to plead the ineffable. As a general rule of advocacy, paragraphs that begin It is impossible to describe the pleasures…or No mere summation can…should be strictly debarred. And yet what is a reviewer to do with a writer like Italo Calvino, whose books with such fine, lawless abandon seem to leap free of all critical regimentation, eluding equally any easy condensation or categorizing? How, for example, is one to do justice to a book like Cosmicomics (1965), that endlessly inventive re-creation of our myths of Creation, whose main character, one Qfwfq by name, remembers the passing of the dinosaurs? One might matter-of-factly point out that it's the sort of book that contains a sparklingly comic domestic argument taking place moments before the solar system is born and an affecting account of the first queasy stirrings of love in a Carboniferous protoreptile. But this is only a covert variation on the ineffability plea.
Review, 4496 words
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