Evidently Lotaria has a very different view towards reading for context:
She explained to me that a suitably programmed computer can read a novel in a few minutes and record the list of all the words contained in the text, in order of frequency. "That way I can have an already completed reading at hand," Lotaria says, "with an incalculable saving of time. What is the reading of a text, in fact, except the recording of certain thematic recurrences, certain insistences of forms and meanings? (p. 186)
Well there ya go. All that I’ve taken the time to dig out by myself is doable by a computer in "a few minutes." Her theory may have some value:
"Words that appear eighteen times: boys, cap, come, dead, eat, enough, evening, French, go, handsome, new, passes, period, potatoes, those, until…
"Don’t you already have a clear idea what it’s about?" Lotario says. "There’s no question: it’s a war novel, all action, brisk writing, with a certain underlying violence.
Silas Flannery doesn’t know quite how to take this revelation. To be sure, he’s feeling a bit down already as a writer and Calvino sics this woman on him. Then her sister, Ludmilla pays the author a visit:
"My novels give you the idea of an ordinary person?"
"No, you see…The novels of Silas Flannery are something so well characterized…it seems they were already there before, before you wrote them, in all their details…It’s as if they passed through you, using you because you know how to write, since, after all, there has to be somebody to write them…"
I feel a stab of pain. For this girl I am nothing but an impersonal graphic energy, ready to shift from the unexpressed into writing an imaginary world that exists independently of me. (p. 190)
What better way to express the idea of story writing itself? What better manner to show that the author is independent of the writing, no matter what amount of agony of emotion and effort go into the work? I love the little stories that Calvino presents to display the qualities of good writing–and good reading for that matter.
This is truly a book about and for writers at all stages of their journey.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology