He nacido en América

Spread over four decades (1951-1985), this illuminating series of interviews with Italo Calvino produces on readers the effect of a great work in progress, of a multifaceted and mobile autobiography in progress raised in successive expansions. A self-presentation similar to a kaleidoscope, whose captivating figures change before our eyes without ever allowing a stable and finished vision. Precisely as the unrepeatable Italian author would have wanted to appear: coherent but not inert, dynamic without being scattered and engaged in a persistent process of reinvention. Despite the brevity required by the interview format, these pages offer an extraordinarily rich harvest of observations: about his own work, about the genre of the novel, about literature, history, and politics, about the way reading and the role of readers... An essential and valuable contribution to the Calvinian corpus.