The editor of this selection might have considered that readers might not be necessarily au fait with the personalities of the mid-century Italian publishing world and provided a summary, both of the people to whom Calvino is writing, to prevent constant recourse to the end notes, and of his activities during the five-year blocks into which the letters are divided.

Calvino does break his own biographical rule to comment on the events of the student revolt in Paris in 1968, but it is difficult for the reader to work out from the letters alone why he was living there in the first place. Craft, and only craft, is Calvino's concern, but impressions of his nonexistent life can sometimes be teased out. He writes nothing directly here of his experiences during the Second World War, but much later, in 1966, observes: "The whole life of a partisan is lived through an amplification of sound, a detailed recognition of noises and silences, especially at night and in ambushes and reprisals." Suddenly his intense concern with acoustics in his own work, prefigured by a discussion on silence with Antonioni, achieves biographical resonance.  

Nonetheless, readers looking to bask juicily in tidbits of literary dolce vita should avoid Calvino's letters. Beyond the weary editor dealing with the perennial whingeing of authors over the treatment of their books, there is nothing to see here beyond the life of their writer's mind. Yet for lovers of Calvino's work the voyage through that mind is both challenging and deeply rewarding. To his French editor in 1961 Calvino indulges in a bit of authorial angst of his own: regarding the translation of The Non-Existent Knight he complains that the translator has used irréel (unreal) as opposed to n'existe pas (non-existent). "I never say that the knight is unreal. I say that he does not exist. That is very different." To consider Calvino's meticulously calibrated opinions on his own imaginative universe is to be reminded of his own maxim, that fidelity to the literal (or the biographical) "can sometimes turn out to the detriment of a more profound fidelity