SOURCE: “Writing and the Unwritten World in Sotto il Sole Giaguaro,” in Italian Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 115, Winter-Spring, 1989, pp. 93–9.

In the essay below, Cannon uses the stories in Calvino's posthumous collection to support her ideas concerning his approach to, and aspirations for, writing and literature in general.

In a lecture delivered at the New York Institute for the Humanities in 1983 and published in the New York Review of Books, Calvino describes the effort he must make to tear himself away from the “written world” of books: “When I move from the written world to the other, the one we currently call the world, based on three dimensions, five senses … this means, for me, repeating every time the event of my birth, passing again through its trauma, to shape an intelligible reality from a lot of confused sensations, to choose again a strategy for facing the unexpected without being destroyed...