Marcovaldo by Italo Calvino

Marcovaldo by Italo Calvino

A poor city worker keeps seeking pockets of nature in modern urban life, with comic and sometimes disastrous results.

Marcovaldo is poor, hopeful and unusually alert to the natural world. In the modern Italian city where he lives with his family, he searches for mushrooms, fresh air, moonlight, birds, fish, rest and small enchantments among streets, factories, neon and supermarkets.

Each attempt turns comic, tender or disastrous. A cure becomes a problem, a picnic becomes a misadventure, a glimpse of beauty becomes another collision with modern life. Across twenty seasonal stories, Italo Calvino turns one working man’s hunger for nature into a series of sharp, playful fables about poverty, urban living and imagination.

Marcovaldo is a classic short story cycle for readers looking for translated Italian fiction, literary comedy, social satire and magical everyday strangeness. Funny, melancholy and ingenious, it shows Calvino at his most accessible and quietly subversive.

'Delightful and rewarding as always' Observer.

'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times

Calvino is surely among the handful of living writers that can be called, without hesitation, greatEach book by Calvino is a completely original conception. Marcovaldo is one of the best works of fiction published * Spectator *
The greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century * Guardian *
It is the refinement, the oddness and the humour of the thoughts he gets which make Calvino a rare pleasure to read; he is a match for Borges as he stealthily patrols the limits of the unthinkable * New Review *
He will continue to glitter, this strange, lonely prospector in the universe of words, well into the next millennium and after, a master in the empire of the imagination * Independent *
What is so much admired by the readers of Mr. Calvino's later Invisible Cities was already at work in Marcovaldo and with a more cogent narrative drive... Marcovaldo conveys the sensuous, tangible qualities of life * New York Times *

Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in Italy. He was an essayist and journalist and a member of the editorial staff of Einaudi in Turin. One of the most respected writers of the twentieth century, his best-known works of fiction include Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Marcovaldo and Mr Palomar. In 1973 he won the prestigious Premio Feltrinelli. He died in 1985. A collection of Calvino's posthumous personal writings, The Hermit in Paris, was published in 2003.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780099428541
ISBN 10	0099428547
Title	Marcovaldo
Author	Italo Calvino
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Vintage Publishing
Year published	2001-03-22
Number of pages	144
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.