Literature as an infinite universe. And mental honesty. Centenary of Italo Calvino / INCOMING ARTICLES / Weekly newspaper / OpenMagazine / Media

The constant excitement of total freedom, of fighting for a better life without doctrine, and the concept of living as an adventure, even in the minefield of fairy tales, legends and dreams.

Italo Calvino would have been a hundred years old today: he was actually born in Santiago de las Vegas, near Havana, to Italian parents, his father Mario, an agronomist of Sanremo origin, and his mother Eva Mameli, also a native graduate . Science, from Sassari. And the archetypal presence of nature will often reappear in the narrative of the young Italo, even when, having returned with his family to Italy, during the Second World War he chooses to fight Nazi-fascism in the attack division of the members of “Garibaldi”. The political militancy in the following years in the Italian Communist Party will always be accompanied by a kind of old anarchist attraction as freedom from debilitating ideologies and above all by reading, first Kipling, then Conrad, which will be the subject of his degree thesis . Literature, and another free spirit, Pavese, whose friendship would bind him until the tragic death of the Piedmontese writer in 1950.
The promise, that in PCI, always on the razor’s edge, not because of fatigue or personal choice, but because of this permanent desire and complete freedom, fighting for a better life without doctrine, and the concept of living as an adventure, even. in the minefield of fairy tales, legends and dreams.
And in the endless production of Calvino this search for the meaning of things can be seen first: in the novel “The Way to the Spider’s Nest”, written when he was 24 years old, opposition is seen and experienced through the eyes of a child. without a family, which always overcomes the struggle of the participants by looking at one for a green paradise as a home, and another for the desire of impossible love, and another for complete freedom from political and ideological restrictions.
Even when Calvino returns his PCI membership card after the invasion of Hungary by Soviet tanks, the stories told will be those of the search for the limitless powers of the mind, of fantasy, of imagination, even at the cost of withdrawal. from the main idea and appear as a true anarchist of spirit: and on the other hand one of his most famous and interesting characters, Cosimo, the main character of “Baron in the Woods”, decides not to touch the earth again, imitating. the intolerance of its creators for labels and major doctrines.
Certainly his ways met the narrative of Borges, or the way of Alice Lewis Carroll, or the endless world of Giordano Bruno, or the characters in the middle of the animal, the dream, the nature of Tommaso Landolfi, especially that of “La pietra lunare.”. Not forgetting Perec, Queneau and other lovers of the infinite game of literature, the last heirs of noble realism, a meeting that was favored by the long stay of the writer in Paris from 1966.
The search for its characters, the attempt to express the infinity of worlds as in “Invisible Cities”, the symbolism of images, even those of cards, with their infinite possibilities of integration, does not represent the game as an end in itself. , but an attempt to understand or simply incorporate the variety of what is there.
Until his other transformation, a convinced defender of ideological causes, he finds himself, in “Investigator’s Day”, facing the torture of Cottolengo’s parents and guests. And with the total dedication of those who have decided to give their presence to those who cannot even thank, in human terms. A true testimony of intellectual honesty, and respect for those who dedicate their lives to the less fortunate, beyond ideology. And the same words.