Memoirs : 'You ask me for a biographical note - something that always embarrasses me. Biographical data . . . are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst", said Calvino in his essay 'By Way of an Autobiography'.
Aware of this attitude, the publishers of Hermit in Paris claim that "this collection of posthumously collected personal writings by Italo Calvino is the closest we will ever come to the autobiography of this most private of writers".
The book - a collection of autobiographical writings and interviews assembled and edited by the author's widow - reflects, and is affected by, this contradiction. That these texts were chronologically grouped by Calvino in a folder marked 'Autobiographical Pieces', does not prove that he intended to see them published in book-form.
However, as his wife says, "there is no doubt that they refer to the most important aspects of his life". Hermit in Paris begins with a short piece of 'literary geography' and ends with the last interview completed shortly before Calvino's untimely death in 1985. Born in 1923, this journalist, editor, short-story writer, novelist and translator "explains" his existential, literary and political choices.
The strength of Calvino's political convictions is remarkable. Ranging from the early days of the Italian Resistance "in times of dictatorship and total war" to his exit from the Communist Party and his assessment of his Stalinist sympathies, the book will surprise those who consider him a rationalist and a moderate.
Still, it is a pity that his award-winning reportage of the 1951 visit to the Soviet Union (published in the Communist newspaper, L'Unità) is not included. It would have provided a telling contrast to the previously unpublished 'American Diary 1959-1960'.
Highlights of Calvino's account of his time in America - the longest but not always most engaging piece in the book - are his meeting with Martin Luther King ("a very stout and capable person") during race riots in Alabama and the Kennedy-Nixon election.
'American Diary' is also a Baedeker of America's major cities (ominously, in the "Italo-Irish dictatorship" of Boston, Calvino was "violently frightened by the face of American Catholicism"). "The call of the big city," admitted Calvino, was always stronger than that of his provincial roots. His "capital cities", this book shows, were Turin and Rome in Italy, Paris and New York abroad.
Three letters written in early 1974 to the Italian departments of UCD and TCD document that Calvino was due to come to Dublin. For a number of reasons (including another operation to cure his chronic haemorrhoids), the trip was postponed. Contact was re-established in 1977 but Dublin, paraphrasing the title of one of his most successful novels, remained for Calvino an 'invisible city'.
To an English-speaking readership, Calvino's reputation as one of the finest writers of the 20th century began with two book reviews. One was by Gore Vidal in The New York Review of Books (1974) and the other by Salman Rushdie in The London Review of Books (1981). Calvino considered Rushdie's "a wonderful essay".
The success of his work with public and critics was significantly due to the excellence of William Weaver's translations. Calvino endorsed translation and was keenly concerned with what he considered "the secret essence of language" and its translatability.
He was fluent in French (his translation of Queneau's Le chant du Styrène is exemplary) and Spanish, and had a good command of English. Calvino worked very closely with his principal translators. Indeed, one of his alleged ambitions was to translate his own work.
Among his translators into English - D.S. Carne-Ross, Archibald Colquhoun, George Martin, Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks, Barbara Spackman and Peggy Wright - there is also an Irishman. Patrick Creagh authored the translation of Calvino's "shining literary testament", Six Memos for the New Millennium.
Hermit in Paris presents the translator with, probably, even greater difficulties than Calvino's fiction and literary criticism. In these "exercises of memory", as he referred to autobiographical writings, Calvino's characteristically clear voice and tone are less consistent and, occasionally, slightly stilted.
Martin McLaughlin, an Oxford academic, has proved to be a first-class literary translator, displaying the skills that recently won him the John Florio Prize for the translation of Calvino's Why Read the Classics?
He has also brilliantly revised the translation of Calvino's début as a writer, The Path to the Spiders' Nests, and is the author of an excellent monographic study on the Italian novelist: Italo Calvino (Edinburgh University Press, 1988).
Despite its uneven quality, Hermit in Paris is worth reading because it sheds light on the author's development from militant to hermit. This posthumous autobiographical book, therefore, is a welcome addition to the list of Calvino titles in English translation. It will deepen our understanding of an author, Salman Rushdie judged to possess "the power of seeing into the deepest recesses of human minds".
When Calvino came out of the coma that followed his first cerebral haemorrhage and operation, the surgeon was optimistic about his recovery. At a press conference he said that he had never seen "a brain structure of such delicacy and complexity".
At his most confessional, Calvino exhibits much of that delicate and complex mind.
Marco Sonzogni is faculty fellow in Italian at University College Dublin
Hermit in Paris. By Italo Calvino. Translated by Martin McLaughlin.
Jonathan Cape, 255pp. £16.99