‘The place of the multiplicity of possible things’: 'Cosmicomics' by Italo Calvino – Book Recommendation

Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics hurtles through space and time, exploding with colours, crystals, moons, molluscs, spirals, and stars. Our guide through many of the stories is Qfwfq, a being who may have a vowel-deficient and unpronounceable name but is both a cosmic traveller and something of a shape-shifter, becoming, at various points in the stories, a moon-milk gatherer (yep, I didn’t know that was a thing, either), a mollusc, a dinosaur, a unicellular organism, and a steamer captain. Quite the life and career. Yet Qfwfq’s immortality is really our own, since we are all, ultimately, stardust transmuted across millennia, our links to the past inescapable.

Calvino has quite the knack of combining beauty with the grotesque, particularly in relation to the moon, which (as in reality) makes regular appearances. But that’s not all. Mathematical logic and scientific fact are fused with parodic absurdity and mythological allusions as Calvino explores some very human issues, especially desire, rejection, competition, loss, obsession, divided loyalties, displacement, survival instincts, and the mixed blessings of inexorable progress. Recognition of infinite potentiality is set against the idea that creation might represent desecration of the perfection of nothingness. Another concern is how we make sense of the opposing forces of chaos and order. In one tale, these are personified in two women, Wha and Xha, both of whom Qfwfq is romantically involved with and of whom he states, ‘all I would need is to have them both together for just one second to understand’. Indeed.

Quite a few of the stories touch on semiotics, and the need for communication, dialogues, and interaction form an overarching theme. Lest you get the impression that this is all terribly serious, let me assure you that these stories are eccentric and funny in the best and most thought-provoking of ways. As we, like Qfwfq, wend our ways perplexedly through life, worrying about our relationships, how we are perceived, and what our legacy may be, we might consider that ‘universes come and go, but it’s always the same stuff that goes round’ (including, as per Cosmicomics, back numbers of newspapers, Ionic capitals, pear cores, and grand pianos flying through space). As Calvino notes, past what we see of the world, there is a ‘beyond which opens up’ and gives us our ‘most faithful image[s]’, and I think it is for and about this that Cosmicomics is written: ‘our true element which extends without shores, without boundaries’.

Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino ISBN: 9780141189680