Reaching for the moon

Some writers spend their careers happily producing variations on the same book. Others seem to rethink the sort of book they would like to write with each new work. Only a very few, however, have a career which looks like a planned trajectory into something completely new; you would not predict Tolstoy’s late fables from his first autobiographical sketches, or the opaque fantasy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake from the dogged realism of Dubliners. And yet all the steps in between are carefully considered, and the career makes perfect sense.

Italo Calvino was very much one of those writers. Born in Cuba of Italian parents in 1923, by the time of his early death in 1985 he was f