And in the (subtitled) Hebrew-language animation above (perfectly scored by Erik Satie), we see an adaptation of Calvino’s “The Distance from the Moon” from Cosmicomics, a collection whose fictions, writes Ted Gioia, “are absurd and incoherent, yet the plot lines are filled with romance, drama, and conflicts that draw the readers deeper and deeper into the text.” At the top John Turturro reads Calvino’s “The False Grandmother” from his folklore anthology, a version of the “Little Red Riding Hood” story. In the two animated videos here, we see Calvino’s genius for conjuring irrational fables. But for those who know that life is lived in stories, it rings perfectly true.
![italo calvino the false grandmother italo calvino the false grandmother](https://img.haikudeck.com/mg/2421daaf58_1475173738355.jpg)
It’s a discomfiting idea for rationalists. They are as meandering and episodic as fairy tales, filled with irrelevant detail that we pick up in fascination then quickly forget. However, Calvino will often break into the novel to remind us of the artifice, and at one point declare his desire “to follow the mental models through which we live our human events.” Those models, Calvino suggests, are not organized and systematic. Well, what are we to call the work of Invisible Cities and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler author Italo Calvino? Jonathan Galassi identifies Calvino as a postmodern folklorist, drawn into the mature idiom of his best-known books by his sustained engagement in “the magisterial anthology Italian Folktales” in 1956, a task that made him into “a modern-day Grimm.” Ballard, the scholastic labyrinths of Borges, and….
![italo calvino the false grandmother italo calvino the false grandmother](https://pm1.narvii.com/7294/3f027b472249435a1faae3f0769130b288aa3541r1-1536-1079v2_hq.jpg)
ITALO CALVINO THE FALSE GRANDMOTHER FREE
Lewis, whose Narnia books ( available in a free audio format here) rather literally give us another world in this one.īut we may soon find ourselves catapulted into the neurotic nightmares of Kafka, the sci-fi paranoia of Philip K.
![italo calvino the false grandmother italo calvino the false grandmother](https://pics.me.me/thumb_she-came-to-the-jordan-river-58074961.png)
They may at first be those of the Protestant theology and Victorian morality of C.S. But these sorts of stories offer new maps for reality. There are those books we go to not to escape this world, but to experience the truth of a mysteriously attributed quote, “There is another world, and it is this one.” That is to say that the worlds we find in certain novels are no less filled with dread, ambiguity, and moral freight than our own.