Calvinoism

Jonathan Coe

• Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino, translated by Patrick Creagh
  Cape, 124 pp, £5.99, February 1992, ISBN 0 224 03311 5
• Under the Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver
  Cape, 86 pp, £10.99, February 1992, ISBN 0 224 03301 8
• The Fountains of Neptune by Rikki Ducornet
  Dalkey Archive, 220 pp, $19.95, February 1992, ISBN 0 916583 96 1
• Small Times by Russell Celyn Jones
  Viking, 212 pp, £14.99, February 1992, ISBN 0 670 84307 5

‘What tends to emerge from the great novels of the 20th century is the idea of an open encyclopedia,’ wrote Calvino in 1985, the year of his death. Tracing the lineage of the encyclopedic novel through Perec, Mann, Proust and Flaubert, he homes in on the figures of Carlo Emilio Gadda and Robert Musil, two ‘engineer-writers’ who have one quality in common: ‘their inability to find an ending’. Despite his own love of arcana and encyclopedic forms, Calvino’s relationship to this tradition was always tangential, for the simple reason that, in his own words, ‘my temperament prompts me to “keep it short” ’: but now we have two volumes which, because unfinished, are more defiantly, maddeningly ‘open’ than anything else in his canon, and which can therefore scarcely avoid taking on something of the glamour which in Gadda’s novels was an intrinsic quality – their sense of being ‘left as fragments, like the ruins of ambitious projects that nevertheless retain traces of the splendour and meticulous care with which they were conceived’.