The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a preference for novels that reveal complex and difficult human relationships while maintaining a sense of clarity.
Italo Calvino's quote suggests that he is drawn to novels that, despite their exploration of complicated and sometimes dark aspects of human relationships, manage to present these elements clearly. The 'illusion of transparency' implies that the author believes a good narrative should illuminate the intricacies of human connections, allowing readers to grasp the underlying emotions and dynamics, even when those dynamics are fraught with conflict and discomfort.
In practice
This quote could be used in a book club discussion about character development.
Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.
...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells.
Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you canβt make anything.
Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.
In the century-long history of Chinese science fiction, apocalyptic themes were mostly absent. This was especially true in the period before the 1990s, when Chinese science fiction, isolated from the influence of the West, developed on its own.
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
A novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.
People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.
My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
I found literary idols in Adrienne Kennedy, Nella Larsen, and Ntozake Shange, writers who'd dared to locate a sanctioned, forbidden space between white vulnerability and black invincibility.
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