Egypt Book

This is a series of lectures and in each of them Calvino takes it upon himself to recommend to the next millennium a particular literary value which he holds dear, and has tried to embody in his work. That way this book becomes not only a manifesto on how to write but also a guide to interpreting Calvino's writings.

1) Lightness: not frivolity but a lightness of touch that allows the writer and reader to soar above the paralyzing heaviness of the world.
2) Quickness: the mental speed of the narrative ' he takes the rapid trot of a folktale as his model here. The narrative should pull the reader along and not get mired up in questioning the non-essential parts.
3) Exactitude: the novel should be perfectly proportioned. Calvino says his guiding image when composing a literary work is the crystal ' the magnificent complexity of it and the fact that it can be held in one hand and admired despite all that complexity. The only way to capture life might be to crystalize it with rigid rules?
4) Visibility: or the visual nature of the literary work is all important. For Calvino, every story begins as a visual cue, to which more and more images are added until he has to summon words to describe this profusion of images. He worries about what will happen to the originality of the visual imagination in a world supersaturated by external images.
5) Multiplicity: a literary work should try to encompass the whole known world. It should be ambitious beyond measure. Without unachievable ambition among its practitioners, literature cannot survive long. So Calvino exhorts us to soar beyond the most distant horizons we can conceive of and then to look down and see everything and then write everything. This section is a paean to the encyclopedic novel.
And lastly,
6) Incompleteness: a good novel would be incomplete, just like this list. No one could locate the last memo.