A critical study tracing Calvino's career book by book, from the early short stories and The Path to the Spiders' Nests through the Our Ancestors trilogy, the Cosmicomic stories, Invisible Cities, and If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, situating each work within its literary influences and intertexts.
Books mentioned in Italo Calvino (26)
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson: “mixing Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Stevenson's Treasure Island (I, 1196; The Path, 20).”
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway: “for his first novel he had explicitly tried to mingle For Whom the Bell Tolls with Treasure Island”
The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges: “Both of these passages allude to the title of Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths and its thematics of ramified time”
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky: “Flannery sets out to obtain inspiration by transcribing the opening passage from a classic novel, such as Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment”
Utopia by Thomas More: “Invisible Cities (1972) rewrites Marco Polo's travels recounted in Il milione as well as More's Utopia”
Candide by Voltaire: “Consisting of thirty chapters, like one of its literary models and intertexts, Voltaire's Candide, it recounts the life of the protagonist Cosima”
Clarissa by Samuel Richardson: “a vast range of allusions to contemporary texts from Lesage's picaresque novel Gil Blas to Richardson's Clarissa and Fielding's Jonathan Wild.”
Gil Blas by Alain-René Lesage: “a vast range of allusions to contemporary texts from Lesage's picaresque novel Gil Blas to Richardson's Clarissa”
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes: “or the play within the play of Hamlet, or Don Quixote reading Don Quixote, is that if fictional characters can become readers or spectators...”
The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: “the name is also determined by that of the protagonist of Conrad's The End of the Tether, Captain Whalley”
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: “a passage in which The Ancient Mariner seems to meet Wuthering Heights (the Italian title of Bronte's novel, Cime tempestose, is echoed in 'Tempesta solare')”
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “a passage in which The Ancient Mariner seems to meet Wuthering Heights”
La Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal: “a first sentence that deliberately recalls the first sentence of another favourite intertext, Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme”
Metamorphoses by Ovid: “the central city Baucis recalls the myth of Baucis and Philemon, which is also the central tale of Ovid's Metamorphoses”
Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto: “Calvino says of Ariosto's Orlando furioso and of Fenoglio's Una questione privata”
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: “a text that stands as a modern, secular version of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, a favourite text with Calvino's Marxist mentor Vittorini”
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: “the intertextual allusion to Eliot's The Waste Land (lines 43-59) being made explicit by the reference to 'the distinguished Lloyds employee'”
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: “The appearance, in the penultimate chapter, of a character such as Prince Andrej Bolkonsky, from Tolstoy's War and Peace (another favourite text of Calvino)”
Inferno by Dante Alighieri: “Dante's Inferno, like the first sections in Palomar, is largely visual”
The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino: “The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) reworks Ariosto's Orlando furioso along with major myths of Western literature”
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad: “the description of the ominous calm preceding the storm is indebted to Conrad's depiction there of the tranquil sea and of Lord Jim's feelings of serenity”
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: “Les Fleurs du mal and Heart of Darkness are cited, as well as Sade's Justine and Freud's interpretation”
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas: “he had spent hours listening to an old convict reading The Count of Monte Cristo out loud and had enjoyed that very much”
In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: “a passage describing the decadent leper colony on Molokai in Stevenson's In the South Seas resides behind Calvino's invented leper colony”
King Lear by William Shakespeare: “A minimalist account of King Lear even conveys some of the force of his famous speech in the storm”
The Odyssey by Homer: “the preface to The Odyssey (also 1981, but whose origins go back to the mid-1970s)”