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Eugenio Bolongaro. halo Calvino and the Compass of Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Pp. ix + 239.
In this study, Eugenio Bolongaro revisits five of Calvino's early works because they are, in his view, thematically representative of a significant phase in the Italian writers literary development. The opening chapter ("Italy at the Crossroads, 1945-1963") provides the historical and cultural framework in which these early novels were produced. Here Bolongaro discusses at some length Calvino's fundamental cultural and literary experiences while retracing the major developments of the debate on the intellectual's role in modern society. Bolongaro argues that it is only through an understanding of these cultural contacts that an alternative reading-outside the usual global, postmodern perspective that pervades Calvino scholarship-is possible.
The second chapter ("From Neo-realism to the Fantastic") begins with a discussion of the connections between the sociopolitical situation and the literary production of the intelligentsia. Bolongaro argues that in I giovani del Po, Calvino's attempt to put into practice the neorealist program did not create the necessary conditions for an organic dialogue between intellectuals and the working class. However, the work succeeded in demonstrating the limitations of the neorealist poetics to Calvino, who came to reject neorealism as a viable literary poetics. In Il visconte dimezzato, Calvino addresses human alienation in industrial society and, having abandoned the poetics of neorealism, is able to constructively criticize the conditions of the capitalistic tendencies of the time. The fantastic and episodic nature of Il visconte allows the writer to examine the thematic issues that drive the narrative by way of a "poetics of the fragment" (71). Written specifically for the intelligentsia in order that they may analyze their position and their role in capitalistic society,...