The Uses of Literature by Italo CalvinoTranslated by Patrick Creagh

I like Italo Calvino’s fiction a lot, and I’m glad I read this book of essays, but I’m definitely not this book’s ideal reader: it’s a mix of big-picture literary/philosophical/political thought and close literary analysis of works/authors I’m (mostly) not that familiar with (e.g. Orlando Furioso or The Betrothed or anything by Charles Fourier). That said, I like Calvino’s style a lot, and I appreciate how, throughout the book, he talks about the subversive or expansive potential of literature, the way it can let us see other possibilities/other ways of being, the way it can show us that the way things are now is not the only way for things to be.

As far as specific essays go, the high point of the book for me is “Why Read the Classics?”, which is just such a delight. I like how Calvino says we all have to “invent our own ideal libraries of classics”, and how we should read them for pleasure rather than out of obligation—sticking with the ones with which we feel a “personal rapport” (133, 129). I also really liked “Levels of Reality in Literature,” which is a deconstruction of the sentence “I write that Homer tells that Ulysses says: I have listened to the song of the Sirens” (107) and an examination of the possibilities of metafiction and narrative twistiness and stories within stories. “The City as Protagonist in Balzac” makes me want to read Balzac, and “Guide to The Charterhouse of Parma for the Use of New Readers” makes me want to read Stendhal. “Man, the Sky, and the Elephant” doesn’t particularly make me want to read Pliny the Elder, but I do like how many bits of the Natural History this piece quotes, and how Calvino talks about Pliny’s “admiration for everything that exists” (316).