THE FICTIONAL WORLDS CREATED BY THE Italian polymath Italo Calvino, who was born 100 years ago this month, attract adjectives not usually applied to serious literature. Puckish. Playful. Charming. But that is what you get with this author whose extraordinary intelligence never undermined his desire to entertain — to charm and disarm — the reader.
Calvino was a writer whom opposites attracted. He was always serious and frequently funny. His mode was specifically Italian and thoroughly international. He was first a realist, then an experimenter. And his interest in his fiction was in looking both inward and outward: as far outward as the furthest reaches of the known universe.
But he began at home, and the best way to appreciate Calvino’s peculiar genius is to trace the development of his writing, which can be divided into two broad phases. From his early work in the 1940s to 1963, he wrote realistic, socially engaged stories, usually set in the Italian countryside
