Italo Calvino
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- [Ocean of Sound's] parallels aren't music books at all, but rather Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Michel Leiris's L'Afrique fantôme, William Gibson's Neuromancer ... David Toop is our Calvino and our Leiris, our Gibson. Ocean of Sound is as alien as the 20th century, as utterly Now as the 21st. An essential mix. --The Wire.
Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 – September 19, 1985) was an Italian writer and novelist. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).
His style defies easy classification; much of his writing has an air of light fantasy reminiscent of fairy tales (Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), but sometimes his writing is more "realistic" and in the scenic mode of observation ("Difficult Loves", for example). Some of his writing has been called postmodern, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled magical realist, others fables, others simply "modern". Twelve years before his death, he was invited to and joined the Oulipo group of experimental writers. He wrote: "my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language." [1] [May 2007]
