By turns fascinating, beautiful and tedious. Highly original.
( )

In 1965 Italo Calvino published a volume of twelve short stories which combined exotic scientific facts with the most mundane of human thoughts and behaviours, to produce a wonderfully quirky brand of fiction. This was the original Cosmicomics.
   The only possible way of getting across their oddness is with examples. In ‘All at one Point’ the science is the suggestion that, back at the beginning of the Universe before it began expanding, before even space and time existed, everything was concentrated in a single point. Which is fair enough, except that this is all being described to us by Qfwfq, who lives there—along with his various neighbours and a cleaning lady (who, as you can imagine, had a pretty easy time of it). In ‘At Daybreak’ the scientific fact is that, before the Sun condensed from the primordial nebula and began to shine, the Solar System was dark. So we get: ‘Pitch-dark it was—old Qfwfq confirmed—I was only a child, I can barely remember it. We were there, as usual, with Father and Mother, Granny Bb’b, some uncles and aunts who were visiting…’ Other stories take a fact and exaggerate it to the limit; for instance, early in the Earth’s history the Moon was much nearer than it is today—which is true: even as late as the Mesozoic when dinosaurs roamed the planet, it looked bigger in their Jurassic skies than it does in ours; so in ‘The Distance of the Moon’, a story of unrequited love, we see it so close that Qfwfq and his neighbours could row a boat out underneath, prop a ladder against it and climb up. And ‘The Light-Years’ is a magnificent display of pompous self-regard and rampant paranoia on a (literally) cosmological scale.
   All twelve are like this; and while some knowledge of science might be helpful, it’s not essential: each story has a short preface, outlining the fact or theory it’s about to stretch to breaking point. The style is dense, crammed with equivocations and clarifications; Calvino’s favourite phrases include ‘In other words…’, ‘Or, rather,…’ and ‘In short…’
   It’s hard to say what happened between 1965 and 1967 when a second batch, of eleven stories this time, was published—but they’re definitely not quite the same. One of these—‘Mitosis’, a description of a single cell dividing in two, narrated by the cell itself and done as a sort of love story—is astonishing; but overall, as with a third batch the following year, they’re less quirky and more single-minded, more relentless in pursuing an idea, just as clever but (to my mind anyway) less entertaining. This volume contains all thirty-one, plus some extras—the later ones interesting enough, but those first twelve strange, funny, original. ( )

It's okay. This didn't quite reach the heights of other works of Calvino's that I've read, but it has its moments. ( )

Calvino is a favorite author, but these stories are too much for me. They are at the same time simplistic and demanding, asking me to pay attention to vast details while I'm trying to find some grounding for each different tale. I'm alternately feeling interested in some phrase, and then bored at the continuing slow development of - something. They exhaust me, so I have read a scattered few to ponder over, considering whether I'm done with them or maybe will return for another try, but not until some later time. ( )

Poetic exploration of the galaxy, from the Big Bang to Mitosis. The main character "Qfwfq" resides in the chapters exploring the scientific, fantastic, and his own emotions at various states in the cosmos. The chapter, World Memory, was like an Edgar Allen Poe story crossed with Philip K Dick, the protagonist collecting memories and world history for prosperity, in order to preserve the human experience for eternity, but altering the recorded parts he did not like about himself to an extent that it affected reality. I enjoyed the inclusion of mythology, Eurydice and Pluto, (the true terrestrials of Earth); and Calvino's own play on language, sometimes forcing the reader's mind to visualise his stories in the form of a comic strip. Overall fiction akin to Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott. ( )