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Cosmiccomics by Italo Calvino (review Ursula K Le Guin: The Guardian)

Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Wed 05 Aug 2009 06:54 PM PDT  

Italo Calvino   

Cosmiccomics


book review
by
Ursula K Le Guin
The Guardian, 


The summer reading I like best is either a lovely, long, fat novel to lie down with and get lost in, or a collection of stories, like a basket of summer fruit, to savour one or two at a time. Here, from Italo Calvino, is a great big basket of stories - nectarines, apricots, peaches, figs, everything.

It's a compendium of the volume Cosmicomics (published in English in 1968), seven newly translated stories from La Memoria del Mondo (1968), all the stories from Time and the Hunter (1969), four from Numbers in the Dark (1995), and a couple of uncollected pieces. It's a joy to have all the Cosmicomics within one cover - and a handsome cover it is, and a well-made book. More than a third of the stories were entirely new to me, and will be to most readers in English; some of them are jewels. The translations are entirely satisfactory, and Martin McLaughlin's introduction couldn't be better as a guide to these dazzlingly idiosyncratic tales.

What was Italo Calvino? A prepostmodernist? Maybe it's time to dispense with modernism and all its prefixes. A young resistance fighter for the communists during the Nazi occupation of Italy, Calvino became and remained a consistently original writer of intellectual fantasy. And what is a cosmicomic, this form he invented midway through his career? Clearly a subspecies of science fiction, it consists typically of the statement of a scientific hypothesis (mostly genuine, though sometimes not currently accepted) which sets the stage for a narrative, in which the narrator is usually a person called Qfwfq. Thus "All at One Point" begins:

Through the calculations begun by Edwin P Hubble on the galaxies' velocity of recession, we can establish the moment when all the universe's matter was concentrated in a single point, before it began to expand in space.

Naturally, we were all there - old Qfwfq said - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?

Note, please, the sardines. They are characteristic of and essential to Calvino's method and style. The story unfolds from this opening perfectly logically - at least if your definition of logic includes, as surely it should, not only modern astrophysics but Zeno's paradox, Borges' Aleph, and the Mad Hatter's tea party.

Calvino's later works may well be considered not as stories in the conventional sense but as contes: narrative illustrations of an intellectual apperception, an idea or theory, even a conceit. A favourite Enlightenment vehicle, the conte lends itself to satire and comedy; Voltaire's Candide is a masterpiece of the type. It presents caricatures rather than characters, irony rather than empathy. Personality and emotion may creep quietly in and exert their power, but the form can also be bloodlessly cerebral. Calvino's contes play word games with science, with time, space and number; and in some of them the game is all there is. A game-loving reader, one perhaps fascinated by Wittgenstein or Eco, will find the pieces from Time and the Hunter especially satisfying; those of us more clogged by mortality may find their radical abstraction sterile. And Calvino's imagination is nothing if not radical. In "The Chase", he cuts to the chase so literally that the pursuit isn't the climax of a thriller movie, but the whole story - the world reduced to a highway, emotion reduced to suspense, so without context or personality as to suggest (the pun is inevitable) a kind of autism.

Invisible Cities derives in this same way from an idea, a notion; but the notion of an old Marco Polo going back to China to tell the old Khan about the cities he did not see on his journeys is so inherently comic and poetic, so infinite in suggestion, that it guided the author into perhaps his most beautiful book. But if some of the Cosmicomics are a bit geeky, most are thoroughly entertaining, and some attain the true Calvinic sublime: intelligence, humour, poignancy and irony distilled to the purely luminous.

Their topics are exhilaratingly immense, the uttermost reaches of space and time, into which warmth and humour enter through all kinds of gaps, quirks and tricks. Calvino's light, dry, clear prose dances over the lightyears, bringing forth homely and vivid images everywhere. Such are the sardines; such is the stone sky above those who dwell inside earth, through which "sometimes a fiery streak zigzags through the dark: it's not lightning, but an incandescent metal snaking down through a vein".

To me the one fault in this prose is its jokey or satirical convention of unpronounceable names. If I can't say or hear "Qfwfq" (kefoofek?), how can I hear the cadence of the sentence it occurs in? Here Calvino's abstracting bent threatens language itself, reducing it to the literally unspeakable symbology of mathematics. That game gets chancy. But we breeze on, borne by the good humour and aplomb of the narrator, especially the ubiquitous, unquenchable Qfwfq, and enchanted by his friends and relations - all the people who were all there at the beginning, because where else could they have been, such as his grandfather, old Colonel Eggg, and his wife, who moved into our solar system just as it was forming. "In the four billion years they've been here, they've already settled in more or less, got to know a few people." But their neighbours the Cavicchias are leaving, going back to the Abruzzi; and Grandmother would like to move about a bit too, go see her mother in the Andromeda Galaxy, maybe. But it's not the same thing, Grandfather protests, and they bicker about it, they bicker for ever, on to the end of time they go, with "that 'you always think you're right' and 'it's because you never listen to me' without which the history of the universe would not have for him any name or memory or flavour, that eternal conjugal bickering: if ever it should one day come to an end, what a feeling of desolation, what emptiness!"

Calvino's take on duality, the existence of opposites, is almost entirely sexual. It does not result in a synthesis but is an eternal process, like the yin-yang figure, represented rather well by conjugal bickering. Qfwfq is male, whatever form he happens to be in at the moment: a falling atom, a cosmic voyager or (in the beautiful story "The Spiral") a tiny mollusc. As a rule there is also a female entity, whose essence is not only difference but disagreement, resistance, escape: the ever-womanly, unpossessable, unloving beloved. Because we are never in her point of view, the Calvinic cosmos seems sometimes skewed to the masculine principle. For me his ongoing metaphor of the everlasting and limitlessly extended Italian family is more useful and endearing. But he develops his gendered dualism richly and with powerful feeling in such stories as "The Stone Sky" and its rewrite "The Other Euridice". Where there's authentic desire, the male sees rivalry; and so the duality expands to the eternal triangle - here truly eternal.

Calvino was ahead of his time in so many ways that only now, 25 years after his death, is his work widely perceived not as marginal because it is fantasy, but as a landmark in fiction, the work of a master. When he was writing, science fiction was not to be spoken of in literary circles, and comic books were if possible even less acceptable. Few literary critics could imagine discussing them seriously until the late 90s. If they paid any attention to the name Calvino gave these stories, it was to emphasise one implication, the cosmic comedy. But he unmistakably meant us also to think of the lightning approaches, the leaps and vast simplifications, of graphic narrative drawn in frames - cartoons, the comics. One story, "The Origin of the Birds", plays directly with this image, directing the reader in a very characteristic fashion: "It's best for you to try on your own to imagine the series of cartoons with all the little figures of the characters in their places, against an effectively outlined background, but you must try at the same time not to imagine the figures, or the background either."

So, there we are, given perfectly conflicting instructions. Perhaps if we could follow them we might arrive somewhere near the condition of "negative capability" which Keats believed the most fruitful of all. I have a notion that Italo Calvino lived a good part of the time there.

• Ursula K Le Guin's Lavinia is published by Gollancz.

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