Why Read the Classics?

Italo Calvino was the Scheherezade of novelists. Endlessly inventive, suspenseful, and exotic, he refused to tie things up and conclude. Reading Calvino, we are like his Mr. Palomar swimming after the sun's reflection on the water: "At every stroke of his, it retreats, and never allows him to overtake it." Instead, "The swimming ego of Mr. Palomar is immersed in a disembodied world, intersections of force fields, vectoral diagrams, bands of position that converge, diverge, break up."
Calvino's world is a warm, illuminated bath of possibilities. One of the multiple narrators of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler has this to say about what Calvino termed multiplicity: "I'm producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell&a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime." If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a book especially reminiscent of the 1001 nights; with its ten different novels suspended in the midst of their telling, it is most charming where it ought to be most frustrating.