Calvino lightness
When I read Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, I was fascinated by the central idea of the book: lightness. I even tried to make lightness a principle of my life, and, in my own writing, I started looking for novels that carried something of that Calvino-like quality.
I also returned to some books I had read before, including Cesare Pavese’s The Beautiful Summer, Antonio Skármeta’s Distant father, and Memoirs of Bras Cubas. Even Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler when I reread it, seemed to me to be about lightness not simply as a theme, but as one of the main forces driving the whole work.
In all of these books, I found something I had always liked, at least partly, without knowing exactly what it was or how to name it. I think lightness is one of the most important concepts for any reader to understand and enjoy.
But lightness as a writing style can sometimes feel like a romantic and difficult ideal to maintain. So my question to those of you who write, or who have thought about this while reading: how do you maintain lightness throughout an entire work, whether it is a novella or a large novel?