Publisher, translator, novelist, critic and polyglot: the many lives of Italo Calvino

In retrospective mood, just months before the stroke that killed him, Italo Calvino mused on the character of his own writing. ‘The time has come for me to look for an overall definition for my work,’ he wrote. ‘I would suggest this: my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight.’ Lightness – leggerezza – was the ideal he had striven for. If we think of his best known works in English – the dazzling high-wire acts of Invisible Cities or If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller – it would be hard to begrudge him the satisfaction of considering himself successful in his efforts.

But let’s look at that formulation again: the subtraction of weight. Lightness here is not froth or naivety. Rather, it is sculpted, whittled, pared back from bulkier materials – from Big Ideas, the weight of one’s influences, the pressure to represent one’s own time.