Italo Calvino is a likable person, and I'm glad he wrote one of my personal classics: "Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore" is an extraordinary book. I've also enjoyed most of his works, especially "Le città invisibili" & "Cosmicomics". If you haven't read any of these, try them or his famous trilogy: they all have that special signature of his, but they're different enough that you might like one and not the other.
About reading the classics too early, I've experienced it, but I also had the opposite feeling. I had little pleasure reading Homer when I was a teenager, but was enthusiastic about the "Odyssey" twenty years later. The translation played a big part in that change of heart, going from prose to rimes, but I believe my age and my larger culture was necessary to fully enjoy it.
On the other side, I read quite a few of Balzac's novels when in high school, and my favorites were "Eugénie Grandet" and "La peau de chagrin". Somewhere in my thirties, I reread the latter and thought it was awful, so pretentious and pseudo-philosophical that I dropped it before the end.
Reading the classics is still the best way to travel for me. I feel I've lived many years in some kind of half-mythical Russia of the last two centuries. I saw the whole Mediterranean world through Herodotus' eyes. My years as a child were heroic thanks to Dumas and Tolkien.
Later on, classics destroyed my condescending attitude to past ages. Reading "Orlando Furioso", I was astonished to read feminist opinions by a man writing around 1500. IIRC, Arioste wrote that a woman sleeping with a man before marriage was no big deal, that they should try a few guys before choosing the best one. Another Italian classic of the same period, "La Gerusalemme liberata", had the same impact on my vision of the late Middle Age, and was an even better read. For another example, as much as I adored Shakespeare as a young adult, when I discovered the Greek theater of Euripides and Sophocles, I saw that having emotional and deep characters was nothing new.
Italo Calvino did not mention a special kind of classics that many people know in an altered way: the religious literature, and especially the Bible (not the King James). Some of these texts are boring to a non-religious reader, but other are fantastic, like Job and Qohelet. To dive in an even older world, "The Epic of Gilgamesh" and a bit of Sumerian literature gave me a strong connection to people that disappeared milleniums ago.
> About reading the classics too early, I've experienced it, but I also had the opposite feeling. I had little pleasure reading Homer when I was a teenager, but was enthusiastic about the "Odyssey" twenty years later. The translation played a big part in that change of heart, going from prose to rimes, but I believe my age and my larger culture was necessary to fully enjoy it.
On the other side, I read quite a few of Balzac's novels when in high school, and my favorites were "Eugénie Grandet" and "La peau de chagrin". Somewhere in my thirties, I reread the latter and thought it was awful, so pretentious and pseudo-philosophical that I dropped it before the end
That's interesting to me, I hated Balzac when I had to read it in school but I loved the Odyssey as a kid. Most of the classics I read and enjoyed as a kid (Voltaire's Contes Philosophiques, To kill a mocking bird, all the books from Maupassant, etc...) I read them for fun by myself without the school asking me to read them, on the other had I hated the books that I was forced to read (Rousseau's confessions, Balzac, Les Allumettes suédoises by Robert Sabatier)
It does show that being forced to read something does color your perception of it. I sometimes wonder what the best way to introduce literature without shoving it down student's throat but still getting them to read good classics.
About reading the classics too early, I've experienced it, but I also had the opposite feeling. I had little pleasure reading Homer when I was a teenager, but was enthusiastic about the "Odyssey" twenty years later. The translation played a big part in that change of heart, going from prose to rimes, but I believe my age and my larger culture was necessary to fully enjoy it.
On the other side, I read quite a few of Balzac's novels when in high school, and my favorites were "Eugénie Grandet" and "La peau de chagrin". Somewhere in my thirties, I reread the latter and thought it was awful, so pretentious and pseudo-philosophical that I dropped it before the end.
Reading the classics is still the best way to travel for me. I feel I've lived many years in some kind of half-mythical Russia of the last two centuries. I saw the whole Mediterranean world through Herodotus' eyes. My years as a child were heroic thanks to Dumas and Tolkien.
Later on, classics destroyed my condescending attitude to past ages. Reading "Orlando Furioso", I was astonished to read feminist opinions by a man writing around 1500. IIRC, Arioste wrote that a woman sleeping with a man before marriage was no big deal, that they should try a few guys before choosing the best one. Another Italian classic of the same period, "La Gerusalemme liberata", had the same impact on my vision of the late Middle Age, and was an even better read. For another example, as much as I adored Shakespeare as a young adult, when I discovered the Greek theater of Euripides and Sophocles, I saw that having emotional and deep characters was nothing new.
Italo Calvino did not mention a special kind of classics that many people know in an altered way: the religious literature, and especially the Bible (not the King James). Some of these texts are boring to a non-religious reader, but other are fantastic, like Job and Qohelet. To dive in an even older world, "The Epic of Gilgamesh" and a bit of Sumerian literature gave me a strong connection to people that disappeared milleniums ago.