Volume 31, Number 19 · December 6, 1984
Light and Lively
By Robert Towers
Difficult Loves
by Italo Calvino
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 290 pp., $14.95
Lives of the Poets: A Novella and Six Stories
by E.L. Doctorow
Random House, 145 pp., $14.95
When the early work of a famous writer rides in on the coattails, so to speak, of the later work that has made him famous, one is inclined either to dismiss it with a knowing wink at the cupidity of publishers or else, if a devotee of the writer in question, to examine it for signs pointing to subsequent maturations and triumphs. Neither response is appropriate in the case of Difficult Loves. Calvino's stories stand on their own as finished performances, as distinctive and seductive in their own way as the more spectacular 'metafictions' that followed them. The author of Cosmicomics and Invisible Cities seems to have sprung fully armored from the head of his muse.
Review, 3047 words
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