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(《纽约时报》,1985年9月19日)

ITALO CALVINO, THE NOVELIST, DEAD AT 61

Date: September 19, 1985, Thursday, Late City Final Edition Section B; Page 20, Column 1; Cultural Desk
Byline: By HERBERT MITGANG

Lead:

Italo Calvino, the master of allegorical fantasy who became Italy's leading contemporary novelist, died early today in a hospital in Siena, Italy, from the effects of a stroke he suffered on Sept. 6. He was 61 years old.

Mr. Calvino was among the handful of major novelists of international standing and was to have delivered the prestigious Norton lectures at Harvard this fall.

John Updike, reviewing Mr. Calvino's ''Castle of Crossed Destinies,'' said that ''no living author is more ingenious.'' The novelist and critic John Gardner called Mr. Calvino ''possibly Italy's most brilliant living writer.''

Text:

Mr. Calvino was attracted to folk tales, knights and chivalry, social allegories and legends for our time: Fabulous and comic memory chips, slightly askew, seemed to be imbedded in his unprogrammed mind. His characters defied the malaise of daily life in the modern world.

When The New York Times Book Review asked him last December what fictional character he would like to be, Mr. Calvino revealed himself and his artistic intentions in his answer:

''Mercutio. Among his virtues, I admire above all his lightness in a world of brutality, his dreaming imagination - as the poet of Queen Mab - and at the same time his wisdom, as the voice of reason amid the fanatical hatreds of Capulets and Montagues. He sticks to the old code of chivalry at the price of his life, perhaps just the sake of style, and yet he is a modern man, skeptical and ironic - a Don Quixote who knows very well what dreams are and what reality is, and he lives both with open eyes.''

Many Stories and Novels

Mr. Calvino has two books coming out in the United States this month. His new novel is ''Mr. Palomar.'' The title character, with a name that recalls the famous telescope, is a quester after knowledge, a visionary in a world sublime and ridiculous. He is impatient and taciturn in society, preferring to spin inner dialogues and listen to the silence of infinite spaces and the songs of birds.

His second book, also published here by Helen and Kurt Wolff Books, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, is a trade paperback edition of earlier stories titled ''Difficult Loves.'' Its characters include a soldier caught up in a private world of seduction and a middle-class woman who discovers she has lost the lower half of her bikini while swimming.

Mr. Calvino's other works include ''The Baron in the Trees,'' ''The Path to the Nest of Spiders,'' ''The Castle of Crossed Destinies,'' ''Invisible Cities,'' ''Italian Folktales,'' ''Cosmicomics'' and ''If on a Winter's Night a Traveler'' and ''Marcovaldo.'' The subjects range from takeoffs on Tarot cards to satires of literary styles.

For a while after World War II, he tried to write realistic stories. His early novel, ''The Path to the Nest of Spiders,'' described his experiences while fighting with the partisans against the Nazis and Fascists in the mountains of Liguria. Eventually, he came to realize that the only way for him to write was to invent. Straight science fiction seemed too remote. In ''Cosmicomics'' he came close to science fiction, inspired by the workings of the universe.

Fables Crisscrossing Time

Thereafter, he began to grapple with modern events in his own way through fables that often crisscross time. ''If the reader looks,'' he said, ''I think he will find plenty of moral and political ideas in my stories. I suffer from everyday life. When I'm depressed, I start with some euphoric image that transmits itself. Anyway, I'm sure that I'm a man of my times. The problems of our time appear in any story I write. Knights and chivalry - they are related to today's wars. No, I'm not writing in a vacuum. The fables just make use of a different language. Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.''

By contrast to his own work, Mr. Calvino ridiculed commercial fiction, including American novels. In ''If on a Winter's Night a Traveler,'' he invented a group called the Organization for the Electronic Production of Homogenized Literary Works. He said it was inspired by the market research conducted by the television networks and some book publishers to determine what audiences wanted to see and read - and then to manufacture it.

''The Baron in the Trees'' is about a young Italian nobleman in the 18th century who rebels against parental authority and lives for the rest of his life in ''an ideal state in the trees.'' Louis Malle, the film director, has said he has long dreamed of turning the novel into a movie.

To help preserve literary traditions and promote new writers, Mr. Calvino edited a fiction series called ''Cento Pagi'' (One Hundred Pages), short novels that are published by Giulio Einaudi in Turin. He explained: ''Italian literature today does not have any real school or current but only complex personalities of writers who are so different. But difference is what is worth encouraging.''

Joined Italian Resistance

Italo Calvino was born on Oct. 15, 1923, in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba, of Italian parents, both of whom were tropical agronomists. Several years later they returned to San Remo, on the Italian Riviera. Mr. Calvino enrolled at the University of Turin, intending to study agronomy. After Italy's entry into World War II, as a compulsory member of the Young Fascists, he participated in the Italian occupation of the French Riviera, but in 1943 he joined the Italian Resistance and fought the Germans in the Ligurian mountains.

In 1945, he joined the Communist Party and began contributing to party journals. With the writers Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini, he shared an involvement in Socialist politics and in the neorealistic literary vogue. ''The Communist Party seemed to have the most realistic program for opposing a resurgence of Fascism and for rehabilitating Italy,'' he said, ''but I left the party in 1957, and today I am apolitical.''

In the opinion of his fellow-writers and critics, Mr. Calvino was a world-class author. His stories and especially his folk tales were translated in many countries.

Margaret Atwood, the novelist, compared Mr. Calvino's urban landscapes to ''the early Fellini films.''

Ursula K. Le Guin, the American novelist whose work includes science fiction and fantasy, said, ''One of the innumerable delights of 'Italian Folk Tales' is its mixture of the deeply familiar with the totally unexpected. He is one of the best storytellers alive telling us some of the best stories in the world - what luck!''

'A Valuable Service'

Commenting on the same book, Anthony Burgess, the British novelist, said, ''Calvino has performed a valuable service to his own culture and, by extension, to our own. Reading his book, we are confirmed in our belief that human aspirations are everywhere much the same.''

Of Mr. Calvino's ''If on a Winter's Night a Traveler,'' Michael Wood, the critic, wrote, ''Architect of scrupulously imagined, apparently fantastic, insidiously plausible words, Calvino occupies a literary space somewhere east of Jorge Luis Borges and west of Vladimir Nabokov. Borges dreams of libraries and Nabokov texts and commentaries, but Calvino pictures acres of vulnerable print, gathered into volumes but constantly menaced with dispersion or vertiginous error.''

Mr. Calvino himself talked enigmatically about his writing.

''When I'm writing a book I prefer not to speak about it,'' he said, ''because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result.''

While he was writing ''Mr. Palomar'' two years ago, Mr. Calvino said, ''What can I say of the book I'm working on now is that it is a quite different one, but it also deals with the relations between a man and nature. Here the hero is called Mr. Palomar, like the astronomical observatory, but he observes only the nearest things around him.''

Mr. Calvino is survived by his wife, Chichita Singer, a former translator for Unesco in Paris whom he married in 1964, and a daughter, Giovanna.