Six memos for the next millennium

’Words connect the visible track to the invisible thing … like a fragile makeshift bridge cast across the void’Withimagination and wit, Italo Calvino sought to define the virtues of thegreat literature of the past in order to shape the values of the future.His effervescent last works, left unfinished at his death, were theCharles Eliot Norton lectures, which he was due to deliver at Harvard in1985-86. These surviving drafts explore the literary concepts closestto his heart: Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude andVisibility (Constancy was to be the sixth), in serious yet playfulessays that reveal his debt to the comic strip and the folktale. Thiscollection, now in a fluent and supple new translation, is a brilliantprécis of a great writer whose legacy will endure through the millenniumhe addressed.Translated by Geoffrey Brock ’The book I give most to people is Six Memos for the Next Millennium’ Ali Smith’Wonderful . . . full of wit and erudition’ Daily Telegraph