Numbers in the Dark
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed, genre-bending Italian fabulist author, a posthumous collection of career-spanning stories previously unavailable in English.
"Everybody telephones everybody at every possible moment, and nobody can speak to anybody . . . Distance has been the warp that supports the weft of every love story." —from Numbers in the Dark
Written between 1943 and 1984, the stories in Numbers in the Dark span the career of one of fiction's modern masters: from Italo Calvino's earliest fables, to tales informed by life in World War II–era Italy, to the delightful experimentation that would define his later work. Here are speculative stories on life in the digital age, genre-bending wonders, and "impossible interviews" with the likes of Montezuma and a Neanderthal. Deftly translated by Tim Parks, Numbers in the Dark shows off Calvino's lifelong gift for subtle humor and shimmering philosophical insight.
Praise for Numbers in the Dark
"Numbers in the Dark is a glorious grab-bag . . . [with] enough gems from every phase in Calvino's career to make it feel indispensable." —Seattle Times
"These stories reward the patient reader with wisdom, humor, and insight." —Library Journal
"Calvino . . . is well-represented in this continually surprising collection . . . . Novelist Parks's superb translations capture Calvino's quirky, iconoclastic voice, helping to make this a worthy addition to the Calvino shelf." —Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Italian novelist and short-story writer Calvino (1923-1985) is well-represented in this continually surprising collection of more than three dozen fables, tales, fragments and dialogues--a third of them never before published, others culled from magazines or newspapers, only a few previously anthologized. Qfwfq, the chameleon-like, timeless creature who related his subatomic and metaphysical adventures in the author's Cosmicomics, here recalls the split-second birth of the universe out of the void (``Nothing and Not Much'') and evinces sympathy for the fragile, perishable cosmos. Adapting the dialogue technique of Invisible Cities, Calvino presents imaginary interviews with Henry Ford, a still-surviving Neanderthal man and a rueful Montezuma, deposed from his Aztec throne. The regimentation and absurdity of life under fascism is evoked in several short fables written under government censorship during WWII, while lyrical neorealist stories explore the moral confusion and social anarchy of the immediate postwar period. A number of fables grapple with political ferment or technological change, like the premonitory title story, written in 1958, about supercomputers that run offices and know the past and future, or ``The Tribe With Its Eyes on the Sky,'' an allegory about nuclear arms proliferation and transnational corporate control of Third World societies. Novelist Parks's superb translations capture Calvino's quirky, iconoclastic voice, helping to make this a worthy addition to the Calvino shelf.
