posting for a literary friend

March 10, 2009 9:40 AM

What actual novels is Italo Calvino referencing or drawing from in the chapter "Without fear of wind or vertigo" of his book If on a Winter's Night a Traveler?
posted by streetdreams to writing & language (3 comments total)

Analyzed this book in a seminar last semester, and I'm almost entirely sure that he made them all up.
posted by awesomebrad at 10:46 AM on March 10

Analyzed this book in a seminar last semester, and I'm almost entirely sure that he made them all up.

All of them? As in, the whole book? While it's possible, there were two consecutive chapters that, to me at least, were pretty clearly based on Borges' two favorite topics - South American gaucho knife fighters and infinitly complex systems.
posted by LionIndex at 11:31 AM on March 10

As the title is a quote from Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being^, it is reasonable to conclude that it was also an inspiration. Like that book (entire plot grounded in the Prague Spring and lifetime effects thereof), it seems to describe a political revolution.
posted by dhartung at 12:09 AM on March 11