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. 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.
And Calvino's imagination is nothing if not radical. 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. Calvino's contes play word games with science, with time, space and number and in some of them the game is all there is. Personality and emotion may creep quietly in and exert their power, but the form can also be bloodlessly cerebral. It presents caricatures rather than characters, irony rather than empathy. A favourite Enlightenment vehicle, the conte lends itself to satire and comedy Voltaire's Candide is a masterpiece of the type. 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.Ĭalvino'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. They are characteristic of and essential to Calvino's method and style. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines? Naturally, we were all there - old Qfwfq said - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. 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. 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.
A young resistance fighter for the communists during the Nazi occupation of Italy, Calvino became and remained a consistently original writer of intellectual fantasy. What was Italo Calvino? A prepostmodernist? Maybe it's time to dispense with modernism and all its prefixes. The translations are entirely satisfactory, and Martin McLaughlin's introduction couldn't be better as a guide to these dazzlingly idiosyncratic tales. 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. It's a joy to have all the Cosmicomics within one cover - and a handsome cover it is, and a well-made book. 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. Here, from Italo Calvino, is a great big basket of stories - nectarines, apricots, peaches, figs, everything. 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.
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