SOURCE: “t zero: Italo Calvino's Minimalist Narratives,” in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 6, No. 2, Summer, 1986, pp. 19–23.

In the following essay, Friedman examines Calvino's absurdist concept of time in the short stories “t zero,” “The Chase,” and “The Night Driver.”

Several of Italo Calvino's short stories of the 1960s pose interesting questions concerning the nature of the storytelling process. Three of these, “t zero,” “The Chase,” and “The Night Driver,” can be described as “minimalist” in that familiar components of stories seem to have been reduced almost to zero.¹ Generically speaking, it may be unjust to designate these texts as “short stories.” They have a plot, but it is reduced to its minimum requirements of beginning, middle and, not always, ending. Their characters are not developed as the reader has come to expect in traditional realist stories. Any theme in these texts is not illustrated by a moral suggested...