Posted by Kevin Donovan on October 27, 2010 · Leave a Comment
Italo Calvino’s writing gets me thinking about the importance of words, how they can, when treated conscientiously, carry great weight both on their own and in the company of their neighbors. Calvino’s writing is bright and he avoids a lot of highfalutin Latinates. Perhaps this is thanks to William Weaver’s translation, perhaps because Italian has a … Continue reading →
Filed under 1970s Literature, If on a winter's night a traveler · Tagged with David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, Elif Batuman, English, Freedom, Gay Talese, Hyperspecificity, Italian, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Prospero, Simple language, Tom Wolfe, translation, William Weaver, words as words
Posted by Kevin Donovan on October 13, 2010 · Leave a Comment
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. This is a blog about books, about reading them and understanding the writers who write them. I remember a line that Stephen King (who makes it into this blog’s canon by a whisker) wrote … Continue reading →
Filed under 1970s Literature, If on a winter's night a traveler · Tagged with 20th century, Anna Karenina, At Swim-Two-Birds, Books about books, E. L. Doctorow, English Translation, Flann O'Brien, If on a winter's night a traveler, Italian, Italo Calvino, Meta-fiction, Present tense, Second person narrator, Stephen King, Western Canon