How long does it take to read The Uses of Literature?
essays
The Uses of Literature by Italo Calvino takes about 6 hours 15 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 15 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1986. 341 pages, about 93,775 words.
13 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 10 hours 25 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 15 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 54 minutes |
The page count is the median across 3 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Italian novelist and short story writer Calvino has been accused of making protons, quarks and living cells talk as if they were people, but here he defends his approach as a kind of animism attuned to the way the universe works. His fascination with myth is evident in pieces on Ovid's Metamorphoses and the separate odysseys that make up Homer's Odyssey. Three intertwined essays on French utopian socialist Fourier present him as a precursor of Women's Lib, a satirist and visionary thinker whose scheme for a society in which each person's desires could be satisfied deserves to be taken seriously. In other pieces, Calvino brings a fresh, unpredictable approach to why we should reread the classics, how cinema and comic strips influence writers, and the cartoon universe of Saul Steinberg. His message is that writers need to establish erotic communion with the humdrum objects of everyday reality.
Subjects: Literature, history and criticism
