In Calvino’s last complete book, Mr Palomar (1983), the eponymous hero settles to a life of cloistered seclusion and the lucid pleasures of abstract thought. With his fictional clutter of sphinxes, chimeras, knights, spaceships and viscounts both cloven and whole, Italo Calvino was himself a strange, Palomar-like prospector in the universe of words. Thirty years on, he has lost none of his fabulous allure.
Ian Thomson, 17 September 2015
(This is a longer version of an article which first appeared in the London Telegraph on 12 September 2015.)