Italo Calvino – Cosmicomics
I finally managed to read it. I took me a while though, i guess because some of the stories are too abstract for my taste.
Cosmicomics is a blend of astronomy, romance, evolution with mathematical characters that emerge from the core of the universe and seem to be immortal. Calvino’s characters are molecules, dinosaurs, humans, they feel love, hate and friendship, they are part of evolution in each one of the stories in this book. Their games create galaxies, they witness the beginnings of the universe, they bet on the outcomes of history, they evolve or they climb on the moon.
Every story starts from a scientific fact, known to us today, and then takes us into a fantastic world, where anything seems possible.
The stories are nice, but the more abstract ones are harder to imagine. Overall, I didn’t like the book very much, maybe because I felt like some of the stories were dragged pointlessly and the level of abstraction made them seem less fantastic and more scientific than I would have liked them to be. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against Calvino’s storytelling, I’m just not that into scientific stories.
I guess my favorite story was Without Colors, so here’s a quote from it:
And I realized, with grief and fear, that I had remained out there, that I would never again be able to escape those gilded and silvered gleams, those little clouds that turned from pale blue to pink, those green leaves that yellowed every autumn, and that Ayl’s perfect world wast lost forever, so lost I couldn’t even imagine it any more, and nothing was left that could remind me of it, even remotely, nothing except perhaps that cols wall of gray stone.
