Italo Calvino chooses the labyrinth as epistemological and cultural metaphor of the contemporary society. The labyrinth is the mirror image of the skills needed to face the complicated reality. It is also the mirror of the contemporary human condition: no way out.Six Memos for the Next Millenium is the guide to go through the labyrinth. It is the literary testament of the author. A series of six lectures that Italo Calvino should have given in the Autumn of 1985 at Harvard University.
AVAILABLE IN ITALIAN and ENGLISH LANGUAGE
« ‘How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone’s ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person! … If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes … Who would move this hand? The anonymous throng? The spirit of the times? The collective unconscious? I do not know. »
Italo Calvino | writer
In his novel, If On a Winter’s Night A Traveller, Italo Calvino wishes to disappear and ensure his writing to his hand «just to pass down the all that can be written and has not written yet, all that can be narrated and that none tells.» In his essay,The challenge to the Labyrinth - 1962 - the author explains that the challenge is to describe his own work with its words. As in the illusive works of Escher, where an hand draws the other hand. The three-dimensional structure offers six faces. FIRST LEVEL: The external axis of each face contains the principles of on of the Six Memos for the Next Millennium. The upper white face is for Visibility; the red one on the right is dedicated to the Exactitude; the left yellow one is for the Quickness. The green face is saved for the Multiplicity. The blue one, on the left, is for the Lightness. The light-grey face is saved for the Coherence, the sixth lesson that Calvino did not get the chance to write. This last supposed lesson reveals the rigorous, intellectual, humanist man that Calvino was.
SECOND LEVEL: It deals with considerations on the works that Calvino mentions in his lectures. The writer’s thoughts starts from the external axis of the map and the publishing date of the mentioned works are quoted.
"LABYRINTH"
Standard sizes
cm 100 x cm 100
cm 110 x cm 110
cm 120 x cm 120
AUTHOR: created by Sara Carbone who makes the texts selection.
MADE IN COTTON OR IN PVC
“LABYRINTH“ can be easily framed.
Write to a angela@paesaggidiparole.it to get further explanation about this work.
Each face of the labyrinth is a small anthology of novels and short stories, a part from the blue and the light-grey faces. THIRD LEVEL: it is a peripheral branch. The authors that Calvino praises in his six moms are mentioned on each face: the Lightness is in honour of Boccaccio; the Quickness quotes Galilei; the Exactitude remembers Leopardi; the Visibility is for Dante and the Multiplicity is dedicated to Gadda. The Coherence is a tribute to Calvino. FOURTH LEVEL: the key words of the art of fiction of Calvino are mentioned: silence, things, city, full - empty, gaze, marks, Moon. FIFTH LEVEL: the three front faces, white, yellow and red, cab be read also counterclockwise to see, in a chronological order, the publishing dates of Calvino’s works. The author’s works of the Fifties and Sixties are quoted on the white face; degli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta; two works published in the Fifties and in the Sixties are on the yellow face; Calvino’s works of the Seventies and of the Eighties are mentioned on the red face…