"Reading, he says, is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead....Or that is not present because it does not yet exist, something desire, feared, possible or impossible, Ludmilla says. Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be...."

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About Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was an Italian novelist and short-story writer whose experimental and imaginative fiction made him one of the most influential postwar European authors. Born in 1923, he wrote major works including Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler. He died in Siena on 1985-09-19.

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