Le Cosmicomiche = Cosmicomics, Italo CalvinoCosmicomics is a collection of twelve short stories by Italo Calvino first published in Italian in 1965 and in English in 1968. Each story takes a scientific "fact" (though sometimes a falsehood by today's understanding), and builds an imaginative story around it. The Distance of the Moon: The first and probably the best known story. Calvino takes the fact that the Moon used to be much closer to the Earth, and builds a story about a love triangle among...

I read this on route to Vietnam, sad to leave my half-read but weighty Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid at home. It was strangely a related interlude, a different look at the laws underpinning our universe and our reality. However the motivation of both authors was very similar - how do we as humans try to understand the complexity and wonder of the constraints and possibilities inherent in the structure of our reality? How does physics translate to our human experience, and how does...

Storytelling at its best. I rarely read anything as creative as this, I mean the book's narrator is someone (or something?) called Qfwfq, and other characters in the book include (k)yK, Kgwgk and Mrs. Ph(i)NKѲ! It's a collection of stories about the formation of the universe using scientific terminology and ideas so I guess to fully understand Calvino's genius, some knowledge of science (especially Physics, astronomy and Earth Science) is a good idea.

Italo Calvino, in Cosmicomics, writes a philosophical, pseudo-scientific fantasy that attempts, somewhat whimsically, to answer the kind of questions a child might pose: How did the earth begin? Where do we come from? How did language begin? The book charts the path of a character named Qfwfq who roams through emerging galaxies, romps with hydrogen atoms, and, in general, makes observations about an evolving universe. Calvino’s book, a landmark of postmodern fiction, depicts a common postmoderni...

Qfwfq : Been there, Seen that, done that.Been where? Where the distance of the moon from the ocean was just a ladder away. Seen what? The formation of galaxies, A colorless world, A time when there was no concept of time.Done what? Lived on the nebulae, Lived as a dinosaur, fallen in love with a tadpole.A literary cosmos made up of staggering imagination, Calvino’s Cosmicomics exceeded the expectations I always have before reading any of his books and it makes me even more proud of declaring him...

This is a wonderful set of short stories which comes as no surprise from the Cuban born, Italian Italo Calvino. I had previously read If on a Winter’s Night A Traveler and Invisible Cities, both I highly recommend, and enjoyed both of them immensely. I once heard about the vast differences between all of Calvino’s novels; that certainly seems true, each one of those books bare vague resemblances to one another; the similarities residing in minor things like, short story format, magical realist e...

I guess if there was nothing on tv and you were bored your mind might start wandering and you might possibly conceive that a civilisation of very tiny unicorns called Gzz and Tjsdfh might live up my arse but you wouldn't want to write a damn book about it, would you. However thin the book might be.

I started this book years ago and then forgot I’d started it. It’s an odd little book. A bit like a series of modern-day myths based around our ‘scientific’ understandings of the universe. Generally, the characters aren’t actually human, but we are talking anthropomorphic characters all the same. Sexual desire, unrequited love, trying to leave your mark. A lent a friend Mitchell’s The Last Dinosaur Book and she mentioned that one of the stories in this is about a dinosaur. I remember knowing tha...

This is a strange and creative work. The briefest of descriptions about Calvino say something like "he's one of the world's greatest fabulists". So, generally people know what they are getting into when they crack the cover. But I'm not sure that I know what I experienced, even now. So, the set up is easy--a bunch of stories about the evolution of the universe. But what the hell does that even mean? For one, each story begins with an italicized blurb that reads like something out of a science te...

The concept is simple: take an abstract scientific concept and bring it to life through the art of the short story. Yet what Calvino achieves in Cosmicomics is unparalleled.The collection contains twelve short stories, each beginning with a short statement describing a scientific theory, a dry, explanatory piece of writing that feels like it could've been pulled out of an introductory astronomy (or biology) textbook. For example, the first story, "The Distance of the Moon," begins with the follo...

The Cosmicomics are a set of short stories published in the sixties by Italo Calvino. All of them follow the same structure: it starts with a sentence from a scientific publication, usually about the creation of our universe and planets. And then our narrator Qfwfq tells us he remembers that period in time, and takes us back in time on his train of thought.These stories are dreamy, philosophical and funny at the same time. I think of them as bedtime stories for adults – they have the enchanted f...

Cosmicomics is just what it says it is, a series of short comedies about the cosmos. The opening story, The Distance of the Moon, is so wonderful, I smiled the enitre time I read it. Calvino takes scientific facts and theories and gives them a human perspective(without any human characters), and does it all in the most simple, quirky way you could imagine. I loved every one of them. The Aquatic Uncle and The Spiral do deserve a special mention for being so lovely. How appropriate, to give this b...

My second try at reading Calvino and I definitely liked this one more than Invisible Cities. Cosmicomics has an interesting structure where each story is prefaced with a scientific hypothesis. The story is then set within that hypothesis where our narrator, Qfwfq, relates the story from the time he experienced each particular event in time. I enjoyed the humor, and also just the wackiness of imagining Qfwfq and his friends and family living before the universe had expanded (it was quite crowded!...