Book review: The Complete Cosmicomics, by Italo Calvino

Published on Thursday 21 May 2009 17:43

Penguin Classics, 402pp, £20 Review by ALLAN MASSIE

ITALO CALVINO (1923-1985) WAS the most inventive European novelist of his time. He was born in Cuba, brought up in San Remo on the Ligurian coast, took part in the anti-Fascist Resistance, and, after university, became a journalist before his first novel The Path to the Spiders' Nests, was published. That was a realistic novel about the partisans, but this wasn't the literary path he would ultimately follow. Instead he made his name with fantasies that were rooted in the real world – The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees – and then published a book of Italian folk tales.

Though he continued to write some realistic short stories, his most successful works – Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller and The Castle of Crossed Destinies – are almost unclassifiable, brilliantly imaginative, elegant, unlike anything else except perhaps some sketches by Borges. Gore Vidal, a friend as well as admirer of Calvino, wrote in an essay on his work: "Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvellous creation like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant."

That judgment applies all the more surely to Cosmicomics, a series of stories, dealing with practically everything from the creation of the world to a re-working of The Count of Monte Cristo and meditations on some of Conrad's novels. The title, however, is significant and can be explained. Both Calvino's parents were scientists and his first university education was in a science faculty. Throughout his life he remained fascinated by science and scientific theories and speculation. How did the world come into being – never mind why? So in a sense these stories are science fiction, except that while SF usually looks ahead, Calvino looks back to the beginning of time, and his narrator, Qfwfq, is evidently not human. At first indeed he is a mollusc, though he will be many other things also, and even as a mollusc he has a host of articulate relatives.

And comics? Calvino, like many of his generation in Italy, grew up reading strip cartoons. He pays open tribute to them in these stories. So, for instance, in his account of "The Origins of the Birds", Qfwfq tells us, "Now these stories can be told better with strip drawings than with a story composed of sentences one after the other". So he proceeds to describe what might be the strip cartoon, though he has to do so by placing one sentence after the other and instead of pictures we have descriptions of pictures. It is charming and, like almost everything in this rich and astonishing volume, elusive. Calvino is as slippery as mercury. "What hasn't been continues to be," he tells us. Mercury is of course not only a metal element, but also the name of the Roman god of merchandise, theft and eloquence, messenger, too, of Jupiter and the other leading gods. In Calvino everything is what it is, and also quite often what it isn't but might become.

These stories are not to be swallowed in one meal, which would prove indigestible, but savoured in snatches. They are light, but profound, whimsical yet serious, playful and a reminder that life is a game as well as something to be endured. What Calvino wrote of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso might be applied to his own Cosmicomics: "It is a self-contained universe, across whose length and breadth the reader can roam, entering, exiting, getting lost."

He wrote them, one of his translators, Michael McLaughlin, says in his introduction, "because he felt that realist fiction was exhausted and the writer had to turn elsewhere for inspiration". Despite this he was an acute and sympathetic reader of all sorts of fiction, as his volume of essays Why Read the Classics? demonstrates. He was, however, quite wrong in thinking realist fiction exhausted. As that promoter and exponent of the French nouveau roman Nathalie Sarraute admitted, if reluctantly, "the traditional novel has a perennial freshness". It also has a capacity to adapt itself to whatever is new.

Nevertheless, Calvino's departure from realism gave us delightful works, and in his last work, Mr Palomar, described as "meditations on nature", he returned to something that may indeed be called realism, though, characteristically, in a wholly original manner.