The Road to San Giovanni

Description

Translated by Tim Parks 'Brimming with Calvino's beautifully crafted prose, dry humour and continual questioning of his own writing and memory' Observer In five elegant autobiographical meditations Calvino delves into his past, remembering awkward childhood walks with his father, a lifelong obsession with the cinema and fighting in the Italian Resistance against the Fascists. He also muses on the language and sensations of emptying the kitchen rubbish and the shape he would, if asked, consider the world. These reflections on the nature of memory itself are engaging, witty, and lit through with his usual alchemical brilliance. 'Urbane and always elegant . . . shows us what a master we have lost in Italo Calvino' Literary Review

Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in Italy. He was an essayist and journalist and a member of the editorial staff of Einaudi in Turin. One of the most respected writers of our time, his best-known works of fiction include Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Marcovaldo and Mr Palomar. In 1973 he won the prestigious Premio Feltrinelli. He died in 1985. A collection of Calvino's posthumous personal writings, The Hermit in Paris, was published in 2003.

'These autobiographical essays marvellously reconstitute different strata of his past in all the pristine, warm stir of immediacy' Sunday Times