His mother was a more digital kind of fish
Via TMN, a London Times look at how Italo Calvino's writing flew.
Certainly, Faulkner was working towards simple structural brevity and lightness in his magnificent novel As I Lay Dying (1930) but Calvino's own inner urgent necessity, away from any weight of narrative, took him farther than Faulkner towards the potential of spinning tiny bytes of text all at once and leaving the reader, not the narrative or the writer, to hold everything together mentally, and in movement. This, he felt, was real realism, because science had knocked out the weighty Newtonian Universe to reveal a world made of nothing at all. The endlessly dividing atom is empty space and points of light. If it all sounds post-modern — that is, relative, fragmentary, shifting — it is, but because Calvino is a great writer it is also satisfying and solid, in the curious way that art allows.
