How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
[Y]ou, who unearthed that title because you know the title and nothing more, and you liked letting her believe you had read it, now have to extricate yourself with generic comments, like "It moves a bit slowly for me," or else "I like it because it's ironic," and she answers, "Really? You find it ironic? I wouldn't have said…" and you are upset (3.26)
Oh, Calvino. Always the jokester. Here, Calvino establishes that you—like many people—can be a bit of a poser at times, especially when you're trying to show Ludmilla how much you like to read. You've tried to make her believe that you've read a lot of books, but in reality you're just pulling titles out of the air. When it turns out Ludmilla actually has read most of the books you mention, you have to backpedal pretty hard to keep from getting found out for lying. This moment of observational humor is one of the more recognizably "normal" scenes in the beginning of the book. By using it, Calvino is able to make your character more likeably awkward (Michael Cera, anyone?). Also, the scene hints toward the later moments in the text when you realize that Ludmilla really is a better reader than you.
Quote #2
"And then, in correcting the proofs, we notice some misconstructions, some oddities... We send for Marana, we ask him some questions, he becomes confused, contradicts himself.... We press him, we open the original text in front of him and request him to translate a bit orally.... He confesses he doesn't know a single word of Cimbrian!" (9.64)
Care of Mr. Cavedagna, our first impression of Ermes Marana, the fraudulent translator whose lies and deceit will basically fuel the action for the rest of this novel. Marana poses as a false translator, but not just to pocket some extra money. No, he believes that the names and titles of books don't matter as long as the stories survive, and that in thousands of years, the names on books won't matter anyway, since people will forget who the authors were.
Quote #3
"We calculated that all this to-ing and fro-ing with the print shop, the bindery, the replacement of all the first signatures with the wrong title page—in other words, it created a confusion that spread to all the new books we had in stock, whole runs had to be scrapped, volumes already distributed had to be recalled from the booksellers...." (9.70)
Ermes Marana's lies and deceit entered the publishing house like a virus and spread out in all directions. No book had the right title or author, and the mistakes produced new errors in an exponential way. In this passage, we start to think about how lies and deceit just can't be undone once the lies start looking so much like reality it's impossible to tell the difference. Have you ever started a rumor, then tried to stop it from spreading? Yeah, good luck.
Quote #4
The pursuit of the interrupted book, which instilled in you a special excitement since you were conducting it together with the Other Reader, turns out to be the same thing as pursuing her, who eludes you in a proliferation of mysteries, deceits, disguises… (13.53).
You're at Ludmilla's apartment, and you become aware that she has had a past relationship with Ermes Marana. Uh oh. This passage draws a direct connection between your pursuit of the interrupted books you've read and the pursuit of Ludmilla herself, both based on "mysteries" and "deceits." It's because you can't fully "know" Ludmilla that you want so badly to possess her. And guess what? The same is true for the books you've read. Since you can't trust anything you read because of Marana's deceit, this fills you with an even stronger urge to hold a book in your hands that you can actually finish. It's the things that elude you that make you most crazy for control—like when something's right on the tip of your tongue and you just can't say it.
Quote #5
"He was here. Now time has passed. He shouldn't come back here again. But by now all his stories are so saturated with falsehood that anything said about him is false. He's succeeded in this, at least. The books he brought here look the same as the others on the outside, but I recognize them at once, at a distance. And when I think that there shouldn't be any more here, any more of his papers, except in that storeroom... But every now and then some trace of him pops up again. Sometimes I suspect he puts them here, he comes when nobody's around and keeps making his usual deals, secretly...." (13.55)
Here, Irnerio is telling you that Marana has a previous (and possibly ongoing) relationship with Ludmilla. Marana, the king of deceit in this novel, seems to come and go from Ludmilla's apartment, and it's impossible to tell when he's been back to inject lies into everything he touches. At this point, you can't be certain that this man even exists, or if he's been created by the international book conspiracy you've stumbled upon.
Quote #6
"I don't know… Ludmilla says that whatever he touches, if it isn't false already, becomes false. All I know is that if I tried to make my works out of books that were his, they would turn out false: even if they looked the same as the ones I'm always making…" (13.57).
While hanging out in Ludmilla's apartment, Irnerio tells you that Marana has some sort of Midas touch when it comes to infecting the things around him with falseness. But while you might think that this falseness exists only in the words that Marana writes down, Irnerio (who doesn't care about words) suggests that there's actually something in Marana's deceit that goes beyond words and seems to infect physical objects. Wait, what? How can a physical object be false? Well, Calvino is always implying that when it comes to truth and lies in books, there is something going on beneath the surface of what you're reading. He'll develop this idea further in the rest of the book, but in this particular scene, he decides to leave the meaning of what he's saying uncertain. What else is new, right?
Quote #7
I have built my financial empire on the very principle of kaleidoscopes and catoptric instruments, multiplying, as if in a play of mirrors, companies without capital, enlarging credit, making disastrous deficits vanish in the dead corners of illusory perspectives. My secret, the secret of my uninterrupted financial victories in a period that has witnessed so many crises and market crashes and bankruptcies, has always been this: that I never thought directly of money, business, profits, but only of the angles of refraction established among shining surfaces variously inclined. (14.4)
The narrator of In a network of lines that intersect explains how his fondness for mirrors and illusions has managed to make him a genius in the world of business. Like Marana, he has discovered that it's not enough to create a single lie that can be quickly proven wrong. You must create lies that lead to other lies, and mix in the occasional truth to make it harder to track the lies. (Sound familiar? It's kind of like reading this whole book). The importance is not to destroy the truth, but to hide it where it can't be found—or where it's so out of place that it seems like a lie. Sneaky.
Quote #8
"He says he is interested in me chiefly for two reasons: first, because I am an author who can be faked; and second, because he thinks I have the gifts necessary to be a great faker, to create an author who can be faked; and second, because he thinks I have the gifts necessary to be a great faker, to create perfect apocrypha. I could therefore incarnate what for him is the ideal author, that is, the author who is dissolved in the cloud of fictions that covers the world with its thick sheath." (15.55)
Ermes Marana, in his effort to inject falseness and untruth into everything he touches, approaches Silas Flannery to help him spread mystery and uncertainty through the world of books. For Marana, the ideal author is one who completely embraces the deception of writing, one who realizes that the author of a book is just a name slapped on a cover page, a fictional character who can be swapped for another at random. It's not exactly what you want to hear if you plan on becoming an author to prove how great you are.
Quote #9
"Perhaps my true vocation was that of author of apocrypha, in the several meanings of the term: because writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impact, then flung far away; because there is no certitude outside falsification" (15.138)
The term "apocryphal" has two potentially opposite meanings. According to Flannery, it originally referred to sacred or "secret" books of religious power, and later referred to books that were attributed to incorrect authors and incorrect historical periods. By saying that there is no certainty outside falsification, Flannery seems to be coming around to Marana's point of view in this scene.
Quote #10
"What were you expecting?" Corinna says. "Once the process of falsification is set in motion, it won't stop. We're in a country where everything that can be falsified has been falsified: paintings in museums, gold ingots, bus tickets. The counterrevolution and the revolution fight with salvos of falsification: the result is that nobody can be sure what is true and what is false, the political police simulate revolutionary actions and the revolutionaries disguise themselves as policemen" (17.17)
The web of lies and deceit is totally out of control at this point. There are no longer just lies, but levels of lies so multiple it makes Inception look like a children's nursery rhyme. Police and revolutionary fighters pose as one another, then pose as one another posing as someone else. Huh? There's no end to it, no untangling the web, and you have no choice but to continue living in the knowledge that you don't know squat.