Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
Published 1988 · 124 pages · 37,000 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction
How hard is Six Memos for the Next Millennium to read?
Six Memos for the Next Millennium scores 49 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 48 out of 100
- Calvino (in Patrick Creagh's translation) favors precise concrete nouns — crystal, cobweb, winged sandals — over specialized jargon, even while ranging across Latin, Italian, and French literary allusion (Ovid, Boccaccio, Cavalcanti, Valéry). The register sits closer to The Great Gatsby's polished accessibility than to a theorist's technical vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Sentences lengthen when Calvino builds a case — qualifying a claim, circling back to an example, extending a metaphor across clauses — but they resolve cleanly rather than piling up subordination. Closer to Bolaño's navigable long paragraphs in 2666 than to Jamesian or Faulknerian syntax.
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- Each memo argues for an abstract literary value — lightness, quickness, exactitude — using myth and craft example as evidence rather than plot. It falls short of pure philosophical abstraction (The Waste Land, Waiting for Godot) because every claim is grounded in a specific poem, folktale, or notebook entry, but the whole book operates one level removed from storytelling itself.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- In under 150 pages Calvino moves through Ovid, Lucretius, Boccaccio, Cavalcanti, Leopardi, Balzac, Flaubert, Kafka, Borges, Queneau, Gadda, Musil, and Perec, frequently citing several per page. The reference density approaches the historical layering of Bolaño's 2666 despite the book's slimness.
How Six Memos for the Next Millennium is regarded
Six Memos for the Next Millennium holds a literary regard score of 75 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.