Italo Calvino, The Art of Fiction No. 130 (1992)
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
"When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors. He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories."
Would you (or anyone else here) recommend another book of his, given those preferences/weaknesses of mine?
p.s. Italian here too, though i never had the chance to read much of him during highschool
"But with all this, I would not be telling you the city's true essence; for while the description of Anastasia awakens desires one at a time only to force you to stifle them, when you are in the heart of Anastasia one morning your desires waken all at once and surround you. The city appears to you as a whole where no desire is lost and of which you are a part, and since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing but inhabit this desire and be content. Such is the power, sometimes called malignant, sometimes benign, that Anastasia, the treacherous city, possesses; if for eight hours a day you work as a cutter of agate, onyx, chrysoprase, your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave."
It's playful and weird and meta, sure, but it's not difficult (or purely an excuse for Calvino to show off), and there is sincerity not far below the surface.
he strikes me as the kind of person who is both mysterious and familiar at the same time -- someone who is wise and accessible, yet avuncular and rare to interact with. and, of course, he's deeply italian.