Italo Calvino (1923–1985)

Now that's good Calvino. Funny, detailed, multi-layered, beautifully written and ever so clever without losing track of the story it tells.

On one level, this is a story about a... let's call him a man, because he's definitely male even if he isn't really human, an eternal being named Qfwfq. It's his life, from childhood to maturity. Only his life takes place over the entire age of the universe, from Big Bang to the 1960s on Earth. Each story builds on some scientific factoid, and then show more creates a very human-although-not-human story from it with Qfwfq as the narrator. Sometimes he's a dinosaur, sometimes he's a bodiless cosmic being watching as the universe creates itself... or if HE creates it?

Because on another level, this is a story about what IS. And HOW it is. How we create the world by seeing it, experiencing it, how others create images of us and how others' images of us help us create ourselves. How telling stories can bring things into being. We all create our own universe, we all evolve, and the universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding in all of the directions it can whiz. show less

You are reading a book which opens with the line, “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller,” and you think, sigh, metafiction. But this is Italo Calvino, and so you take the advice Calvino offers: “Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought”– Hang on, every other? How will you know which ones to dispel and which ones to keep? And yet, it is perhaps sound advice as you read about a reader who reads a book only for his show more reading to be cut short, and when he goes looking for a complete copy of the novel he was reading he discovers he had been reading an entirely different book altogether… And at the book shop he meets a young woman who is also interested in this literary mystery he has uncovered, and together they discover yet a third novel mixed in with the previous two. But then he meets the young woman’s sister and becomes involved in her schemes… and at some point both young women end up in one of the narratives you are reading about him reading… And yet despite this literary shell game, where the narrative peas seem to proliferate out of sight under the cups, the whole is intensely readable and not in the slightest bit confusing. In parts it reminded me of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, although without the prissiness. It certainly convinced me I should read more Calvino – If on a winter’s night a traveller may be one long literary trick, but it’s gloriously done. Bravo. show less

The Written World and the Unwritten World, by Italo Calvino and translated by Ann Goldstein, is a wonderful collection of what they are collectively calling essays. Some are more like notes and commentary, but it doesn't matter, this is a fascinating glimpse into Calvino's thinking.

There are very few readers who will have read all of the works he mentions. I know for some readers that will be a negative, but for those who can read criticism and commentary and grasp the point the writer is show more making without necessarily having read what he is referring to, this will be a delight. Make no mistake, the more works you've read the better you can get his points, especially in essays dedicated to a work. But another aspect to these essays isn't about the specific works but about understanding how a mind such as Calvino's reads and assesses literature.

Many of the pieces in the first section will mention quite a few works but not really be about any of them. He will be talking about a genre, a way of understanding literature, even how to approach writing and translations. He makes his points and usually tosses out an example or two. Even if you don't know those works, the explanation of an idea that precedes the mention of a work is where the takeaway is, not in simply knowing that work. In other words, don't let being unfamiliar with some of the works he cites keep you from enjoying the stroll through how a very intelligent writer and reader approaches literature.

The essay from which this volume gets its name is very good and, I think, one that most readers will appreciate, as well as any writers. Like any collection some of these pieces won't click for you. Unless you're studying Calvino and want to dissect his every word, there is no problem with disengaging from a few of the essays. I found a lot of the ones from the late 50s and very early 60s particularly interesting because that was right after his disenchantment with the Soviet Union and Stalin and his very public resignation from the Communist Party in Italy. Looking at how he touches on workers and wars, political and cultural ideas, is fodder for an amateur interpreter such as myself. Did he mean this? Was he referring to that? I am eager now to go back and reread all of his work. Alas, it isn't as easy as it once would have been, I lost all of my books way back in Katrina and have not even come close to replacing all 5000 or so books. But I can check a few out, find a few second hand, and fill it out with new copies.

Highly recommended for those with an interest in either Calvino himself or with ways of understanding and appreciating literature in general. You don't have to agree with his views to get a lot out of this book, the methodology holds true regardless.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. show less

Qwfwq personifies nebular matter, or tiny amoebas, or mathematical concepts to reveal certain emotional truths. In the first story some characters are caught halfway in between the gravitational pulls of the earth and the moon and must literally chose between two worlds. In another a mollusk possesses as rich a sensory and poetic internal life as anyone else because he can intuit the world around him through the contents of the ocean secretions he consumes.

I felt like Qwfwq was less a show more trillion-year-old shapeshifter and more an old man full of tall tales. So when you brought up a fact in your science textbook like time and space itself is curved, he'll respond with "not just curved but notched and pocketed, one time me and a beautiful woman were free-falling through empty space and we landed in one of those pockets and let me tell you things got steamy in there!"

Which brings me to the best joke about Cosmicomics: how horny old Qwfwq is. He's been around for trillions of years and witnessed godlike perspectives but a good majority of these stories are about his attempts to win over another proto-amphibiod, or chunk of stellar dust, or she-mollusk who is both inexplicably female and the most beautiful thing in the galaxy. show less