They are characteristic of and essential to Calvino's method and style.
Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines? Naturally, we were all there - old Qfwfq said - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Through the calculations begun by Edwin P Hubble on the galaxies' velocity of recession, we can establish the moment when all the universe's matter was concentrated in a single point, before it began to expand in space. And what is a cosmicomic, this form he invented midway through his career? Clearly a subspecies of science fiction, it consists typically of the statement of a scientific hypothesis (mostly genuine, though sometimes not currently accepted) which sets the stage for a narrative, in which the narrator is usually a person called Qfwfq. A young resistance fighter for the communists during the Nazi occupation of Italy, Calvino became and remained a consistently original writer of intellectual fantasy. What was Italo Calvino? A prepostmodernist? Maybe it's time to dispense with modernism and all its prefixes. The translations are entirely satisfactory, and Martin McLaughlin's introduction couldn't be better as a guide to these dazzlingly idiosyncratic tales. More than a third of the stories were entirely new to me, and will be to most readers in English some of them are jewels. It's a joy to have all the Cosmicomics within one cover - and a handsome cover it is, and a well-made book. It's a compendium of the volume Cosmicomics (published in English in 1968), seven newly translated stories from La Memoria del Mondo (1968), all the stories from Time and the Hunter (1969), four from Numbers in the Dark (1995), and a couple of uncollected pieces. Here, from Italo Calvino, is a great big basket of stories - nectarines, apricots, peaches, figs, everything. The summer reading I like best is either a lovely, long, fat novel to lie down with and get lost in, or a collection of stories, like a basket of summer fruit, to savour one or two at a time.
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