Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014; $24.00 hc; 434 pages
Italo Calvino’s work is unique in the literature of the twentieth century; it would be impertinent in this brief notice to try to characterize it, since almost anything said about The Castle of Crossed Destinies or Invisible Cities or Mister Palomar wouldn’t apply to any of the other works. In a biographical piece he wrote in 1978, Calvino addresses this multiplicity from the maker’s point of view: “Writing is such a boring and solitary occupation; if you repeat yourself an infinite sadness seizes hold of you.” Not of most writers, actually; but it may be the reason for what Calvino has called with (false) modesty “that collection of fragments that is my ouevre.”
It’s an interesting literary evolution. Calvino grew up in rural Italy; his parents were left-wing nonreligious people who worked as agricultural experts, imprisoned by the Fascists in the 1930s; Calvino was a partisan at the end of the war, engaged in some firefights and other exploits against the collapsing Fascist regime and the German army, and became a Communist afterwards, a commitment he gradually modified but only gave up after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, a turning point for many loyal Party members. His first novels were realistic, or perhaps neorealist, but certainly not fantastical, more Hemingway than Kafka (he actually went fishing with Hemingway in Italy after the war). The first was The Path to the Nest of Spiders and was pretty successful.
But boredom (or something) set in, and he embarked on the series of little pseudohistorical romances that first won him wide attention: The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees. I was among those whose introduction to Calvino was these clever philosophical fables. My father, though—whose reading wasn’t all that wide—somehow in the late 1950s discovered a little book called Cosmicomics, and for a week couldn’t stop regaling the family with stories about Qfwfq, a being who pre-existed existence, and his adventures in time and space. He hadn’t known there were such writings, and in a sense there never had been.
That collection was followed by another called t zero, which really ought to be t0—a mathematical expression that (in the context) would have annoyed the American publisher even more; the book also appeared as Time and the Hunter, which sounds like a thriller, and which at least as an enterprise in fiction t zero was. The whole of these, and later stories from a more complete collection of Cosmicomic stories Calvino put together in 1984, and some others—refurbished, or exiled and restored, or newly translated—are now collected in one volume by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, introduced by Martin McClaughlin. All of us who over time read our early editions to death, or loaned them to people who loved them and never gave them back, or don’t remember where we left them, will want this volume; those who don’t know Calvino may not know they want this volume, but they do.
It’s true that a few of the pieces have undergone that aging process that certain groundbreaking works can suffer, whereby the effect of strange newness, which was central to their effect, has passed, and without which the work can seem slighter than it once did. The early Cosmicomics mostly turn on a couple of funny tropes that become hilarious when they are insisted on. One is that abstractions like the Big Bang and the expanding (or steady-state) universe are described as though they contained a cast of characters making do somehow under extreme physics conditions, say pre–Big Bang (“All at One Point”): “[W]e were always bumping against the Z’zu family’s household goods: camp beds, mattresses, baskets ... with the excuse that they were a large family [they] would begin to act as if they were the only ones in the world: they even wanted to hang lines across our point to dry their washing.” Some prejudiced people dislike the Z’zus for being immigrants, having come later than the ones who came first, “but this was mere unfounded prejudice—that seems obvious to me—because neither before or after existed, or any place to immigrate from.” This little Italian town settled into the Singularity rises to an astonishing climax, probably the greatest use of bathos as a literary device in modern literature, a claim I make without having read all possible competitors.
The other trope Calvino loved was to take a peculiar or unique moment and describe it in such elaborately logico-philosophical pseudomathematical terms as to draw it out to absurd but not exactly contradictory lengths. The title story in t zero is one: here Qfwfq finds himself “in a random space-time intermediary point of a phase of the universe” where “after hundreds of millions of billions of seconds” he finds himself in the moment of shooting an arrow at a lion who is in the act of leaping from the bush upon him. Will he shoot the lion or will he miss? Is the arrow the poisoned one or not? Will the (already released) arrow and the leaping lion intersect at a point X crossed by both of them at the same moment t0, in which case the lion will fall dead, “with a roar stifled by the spurt of blood that will flood his dark throat pierced by the arrow,” or will they not, in which case “his mouth, closing with a snap of his jaws, will rip my head from my neck at the level of the first vertebra.” The expanding and then contracting universe will obviously bring this moment into being very many, perhaps infinitely many, times, t1, t2, t3, ... “as often as the universe has repeated its systole and diastole.” The question then being, do “the space-time lines of the phases of its pulsation coincide at every point” or only at certain points, of which Qfwfq believes this to be one, thus giving Qfwfq at Q1, Q2, Q3 ... at least a little leeway, or is the outcome always identical? Quotation is inadequate to express how this question is worried through several pages, growing ever denser and more enclosing.
There are many stories in Cosmicomics built on this principle—like “The Chase,” in which a man in a car with a gun is being chased by a man in a car with a gun a certain number of car lengths behind at a busy intersection that lets only a few cars through at a time, moving the two cars in relation to one another like the digits on that old puzzle you had to arrange in numerical order with only one empty square to use. To me these stories are less like real mathematical or physics problems than they are like monkish problems worked through in Scholastic logic, whose rigid assumptions and tedious elaboration are always at hilarious odds with a drastic outcome.
To understand the breadth and originality of Calvino’s storytelling, read the first story in the original volume, “The Distance of the Moon,” deriving from an old theory that the moon was once much closer to the earth; and the last story of t zero, “The Count of Monte Christo.” The first is an exquisite and impossible romance; the latter a lunatic metafiction in strict control, and the nearest equivalent I can think of in fiction to the paradoxical constructions of M. C. Escher.
And the finally wondrous thing about reading this collection, translated variously by William Weaver, Tim Parks, and Martin McLaughlin, is to know that after it will come Invisible Cities, an even greater achievement, and all the rest as well.
John Crowley lives and teaches in New England.
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