Fiction Novels — Italo Calvino

You are about to read an online article by an Unpublished Guy, Fiction Novels, a Profile of Italo Calvino. You crouch in front of the computer screen and use the pointing device to select the Read More link. The site seems a bit on the slow side. (It doesn’t appear to get much traffic. Not many of the most recent articles have comments.) After a few seconds, the listed summaries of the most recent entries are replaced with the full article about Calvino’s fiction. You begin reading about Calvino’s family history. Seems like a reasonable place to start.

Born in Cuba in 1923, Italo Calvino was raised in Italy. Calvino’s mother, Eva Mameli, was a botanist and university professor. His father, Mario, was a tropical agronomist and botanist who also taught agriculture and floriculture.

In 1941, Italo Calvino enrolled at the University of Turin. While ostensibly following in his parents footsteps, pursuing agricultural studies, Calvino read works by Max Planck, Heisenberg, and Einstein on physics. (would blend physics with a sense of playfulness and fabulism).

During World War II when Italy was occupied by the German army, Italo Calvino would become a member of the partisan movement. He would write his first fiction novel, The Path to the Nest of the Spiders, based on his experience as a partisan. Several other fiction novels in a realist style followed.

You are not so sure that the writer of this article isn’t just paraphrasing Wikipedia. You check. Yes, you are pretty sure that this Unpublished Guy is just getting his info from Wikipedia. Maybe some of it is cribbed from dust jackets and the backs of paperback books. Some nerve from a guy who also wrote an article about pleading innocence on the charge of plagiarizing a well known author’s fiction novel. Although, you are not sure if you a Wikipedia article is plagiarized if a conspicuous backlink is provided.

Italo Calvino knew a good deal about science and used scientific discourse in his writing