t zero

by Italo Calvino

A collection of stories about time, space, and the evolution of the universe in which the author blends mathematics with poetic imagination. “Calvino does what very few other writers can do: he describes imaginary worlds with the most extraordinary precision and beauty” (Gore Vidal, New York Review of Books). Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Italian Literature, Italy, Science Fiction, Literature, Classics

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979).

His style is not easy to classify; much of his writing has an air reminiscent to that of fantastical fairy tales (Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), although sometimes his writing is more "realistic" and in the scenic mode of observation (Difficult Loves, for example). Some of his writing has been called postmodern, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled magical realist, others fables, others simply "modern". He wrote: "My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

Calvino was no doubts a brilliant talent, and I've had such pleasure reading him over the years, but I'm now at a point where he doesn't blow my mind as much as he used to. A Change in literary tastes would be one reason I guess. In terms of t zero, it's similar to Cosmicomics more than anything else, but I found it not as good. It did have its moments, with my fave two stories here being in the last third of the book. Overall though, I just struggled with it.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a reader who experiences her books, rather strongly, via the location in which they're read -- and I read the majority of this book in one of the most inhospitable places I've ever been (like, if you believe in bad vibes...I think I found their source).

Something magic still shone through.

I am so, so excited to read more Calvino, this being my first adult introduction to him. His prose is difficult, but stunning, and rewarding, and precise. The stories in this collection are perfectly crafted (especially "The Chase," fucking brilliant), emotionally resonant (especially "Night Driver"), philosophically challenging (every last one!), and have not dated (I actually had to double-take on the 1967 copyright). This kind of writing is directly up my preference alley, and I said it already, but I can't wait to get my hands on more.



A quick note for marginalia-writing-readers:
I got my copy used on Amazon, and was sad to see blue pen scribbled throughout the ENTIRE COPY. I was even sadder when I realized this person was a moron. So please, please -- if you ever plan to sell your copy, if you ever plan to lend it out -- write in pencil so it can be erased. Please. PLEASE.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never read Calvino, in fact I never even heard of him until Radiolab devoted a special episode to the reading of his short story 'The Distance Of The Moon' and I immediately fell in love.

What strikes me the most - overall about Calvino - is is blending of science and fantasy. He begins his stories with a basis in scientific fact but then explores the mysteriousness of these findings through purely magical musings. For me this mix of fact and fiction is at the heart of what makes life interesting and I love that the beauty of science and math can be described so fantastically without being dry, boring, or full of footnotes and caveats.

One of my all time favorite films is Kaufman's 'The Right Stuff' based on Tom Wolfe's novel (which I have not read). In the film when John Glen makes his famous orbit, two of his fellow Mercury astronauts travel down to Australia to communicate with him on one of that country's satellite dishes. As Glen is overhead that night, outside the Australian station is an aborigine who chants and sends up the sparks from a great fire in the heaven. The sparks mix with the stars and form a perfect blend of the mystical and the factual - the human condition of attempting to explain and understand a universe he's only dimly aware of. That scene always stuck with me and now discovering Calvino I feel like I've been given an opportunity to explore that relationship even more.

As for this book in particular, there is a common theme of being trapped I found interesting. He begins talking about a single cell that suddenly multiplies into the void the cell had only been vaguely aware of previously. Other stories deal with our lives as being packets of information and light that are obliged to follow certain rules. Finally we are prisoners in a universe sized Château d'If where every point leads to every other point but never beyond the confines of the walls.

I was also impressed by the writing itself, Calvino was not a postmodern hack - he was very deliberate in his wording (albeit translated) and he was even playful with his endings and wordplay. He really thought through what he was writing and never allowed himself to get off the rails no matter how strange the subject matter. That more than anything else really impressed me because my previous experience with postmodern strangeness usually results in my detesting the author's inability to just tell a damn story.

Finally I loved that everything on the page made me think. I'm not sure if what I was thinking was what he intended, but I appreciated being able to explore those distant, fuzzy ideas that we're sometimes aware of but can never really put into words or even coherent waking thoughts. I found that to be a lot of fun.

I'm absolutely going to read more Calvino.

[Bbrown · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Italo Calvino, but as a result I’ve already read most of his fiction. The collection t zero is what you find when you scrape the bottom of the Calvino barrel, and its obscurity is unfortunately well-deserved. The work is divided into three parts, the first consisting of short stories of relationships told with reference to events eons ago like the formation of the moon, crystals growing on earth, swimming in the primordial ocean, etc. So, it’s in the same vein as Calvino’s Cosmicomics, though not as strong. The third part is a series of stories through which Calvino asks the question “what would happen if I wrote about potentially exciting situations in a removed and academic way?” The answer, unsurprisingly, is that those stories turn out very boring. You may have noticed that I skipped part two. I advise you to do the same, as the most unifying feature of those stories is that they’re terrible. I would not recommend t zero even to Calvino fans, except for maybe part one if you really enjoyed Cosmicomics. 2/5.

[Andy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unbelievably bad, the worst book I've read since joining Goodreads, and one of the worst books I've read in my life. I got suckered into this one because Invisible Cities is one of my all-time favorites, and because I'd enjoyed The Baron in the Trees and If on a winter's night a traveler well enough. Don't make the same mistake I did.

At best it's a very, VERY, VERY poor man's Borges. The style of writing (perhaps this has to do with the translation?) is unreadable, with profusely long run-on sentences that read more like a brainstormed draft than a finalized work. The reader's reward for picking through the mess of diction is a load of quasi-mathematical/scientific crap that is dressed in incoherent imagery, poor logic, and uninspiring philosophy.

If you like this stuff, read Borges, read Douglas Hofstader, or why not try a book (or class!) on actual mathematics, physics, or philosophy of science? Other people have already thought and written about the sorts of ideas in this book at much greater depth and with much greater clarity.

I'd guess that this book was deliberately written with experimentation in mind, and I respect the spirit of trying new and different things. But it's clearly a failed experiment and I wish this had be recognized by the writer in his study, well before getting anywhere near a printing press.

[Drilli · Rating 3 out of 5]

E' un po' troppo cervellotico, ma decisamente interessante questo Calvino che a tratti sfiora la fanta-scienza. Ogni racconto è un raffinatissimo esercizio di stile che parte da una teoria o da un concetto scientifici, astronomici, geologici, biologici, fisici e li porta fino al paradosso, sviscerandone gli aspetti - potremmo dire - "metafisico-filosofici" attraverso elaborati flussi di coscienza del protagonista di turno. Si parte da lontano, molto lontano nel tempo, da teorie sull'origine e l'evoluzione del nostro pianeta o delle specie che lo popolano, passando per i concetti biologici di mitosi e meiosi fino a quelli di spazio e tempo: questi ultimi si analizzano usando come spunto episodi singoli e concreti (un arciere che scocca una freccia, un inseguimento in auto) ma trasformandoli poi in tutt'altro. Sono "elucubrazioni metafisiche" quasi da vertigine, che non ho trovato ugualmente chiare e riuscite, ma che sono comunque tutte tremendamente affascinanti.
Nel tentare di descrivere questo astruso testo mi si è fatta astrusa pure la recensione.
E' un libro che richiede la giusta predisposizione mentale per essere affrontato, e che penso proverò a rileggere in un periodo in cui potrò dedicarmici con attenzione, anziché sorbirlo a bocconcini di 20 minuti di treno alla volta, ma che comunque, anche così, mi ha lasciato un segno.
Del resto è pur sempre Calvino... 💚

[blue solange · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Ti con zero” non è fra i libri più noti di Italo Calvino ma non credo affatto sia un’opera da sottovalutare.
La penna poliedrica dell’autore si affaccia, questa volta, al mondo della scienza con il difficile ma consueto connubio tra precisione e leggerezza. Attraverso la forma del racconto, in una prima sezione, si tratta di mondi alternativi, nella seconda degli stadi evolutivi dell’essere, infine dei paradossi del reale; Calvino riesce a fare tutto ciò come se stesse sussurrando una poesia o raccontando di un fantasioso parco giochi… in realtà ogni parola ha la sua base scientifica.
L’ultimo racconto, il Conte di Montecristo, vede confrontarsi il mio autore del cuore con la mia opera del cuore: un’assurda forma di gelosia non mi permette di essere obiettiva… ma il loro pur virtuale incontro è una delle magie della letteratura.

[Magdelanye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Italo Calvino is the cats pyjamas.
If you are unsure of what exactly this means,so am I.

He has the ability to embellish,to get behind and ahead at the same time,and if you can bear with the astounding way he constantly pulls the rug out from under the reader,you may find yourself helplessly rolling around laughing,on the bus.

*What counts is communicating the indispensable,skipping all the superfluous,reducing ourselves to essential communication, to a luminous signal that moves in a given direction,abolishing the complexity of our personalities and facial expressions,leaving them in the shadowy container that the headlights carry behind them and conceal.* p133

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first two sections of this book serve as a kind of sequel to Calvino's wonderful "Cosmicomics", narrated again by the amorphous "Qfwfq". Calvino's stories, both in this collection and in "Cosmicomics", somehow manage to simultaneously function as postmodern literary experiments, science lessons, philosophical inquiries, cosmic mythologies and love stories. Another delightful treat from one of my favorite minds of the twentieth century.

[cri · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stavolta Calvino ha sgravato - non nel senso positivo del termine. Uno o due racconti molto godibili e visionari, come 'Il Sangue, Il Mare', my personal favourite. Il resto solo un eccessivo svagone: una commistione fra un'enciclopedia scientifica ubriaca e qualche pretenzioso esercizio di stile. E lo dice una grande aficionada di Calvino. Leggete piuttosto 'Le cosmicomiche' o 'Palomar'.

[Saeed tavakoli · Rating 4 out of 5]

دو داستان منشا پرندگان و رانندگی شبانه معرکه بود
من هنوز منتظرم کالوینو باز داستان بنویسه

[Pani Karczewska · Rating 5 out of 5]

Odlot zupełny. Nie radzę czytać osobom, które są pewne rzeczywistości jako takiej. Albo właśnie radzę? Nie jestem pewna.

[Jt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not to broach Calvino's greater works, but this one here should not be reduced to a mere number in Calvino's output of numeric nods to literature. They are simply stories and should be contained within the specialized imagination as simply stories to be contained, pondered, and in a most uncommonly dark way, laughed upon as if their black comedy has not yet found its crux in mathematical disposition. When Calvino compares the angry jump of a lion with Zeno's motionless arrow--in fact the arrow itself that the narrator of that story tries with all his might to shoot at and stop the lion's jump IS Zeno's reasoning--we cannot say he fails when he does not succeed. The arrow may have stopped, for all intents and purposes, any movement in science that science cannot dissect. But it doesn't mean that the lion--not having any sense of science or a mind at all--had its heart pierced without first landing on its intended target, nor even if it did, stopped for a moment to consider its heart being pierced as it dove unto its enemy, to tear his heart out first. You can choose which side of truth you wish to agree on simply by envisioning each character's fate, or like most blind readers, simply by agreeing to the truth our foreign-speaking author appears to lay before us as the answer. Here time is ticking, here life passes right before your very eyes, as any cliche would pass if it had to, only it is you who is the foreigner and not the author who sees it still in motion, for if it is still there as it may be seen, as only what it once was, you may have forgotten... the sea was once blood and blood was once everything but skin.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

To me, there's virtually no doubt that Italo Calvino is a literary genius. Each one of his works create either a beautiful compendium of light and airy magical fables or tricky Borgesian fictional puzzles. I read the first collection of Cosmicomics earlier in the year and was blown away, the lucidity of his prose and the wit of his storytelling are something that very few writers can match. Signore Calvino's follow up Cosmicomics collection, Time and the Hunter, is characteristically imaginative.

The book is broken up into three parts. The first carries on where the previous collection left off, following the celestial being Qfwfq's adventures throughout space and time. The lighthearted and witty prose of the first four stories are a perfect addition to the previous Cosmicomics. In particular I loved the story The Origin of Birds in which Qfwfq describes his encounter with the first ever feathered creatures (a sort of avian love story) through a prose representation of a comic strip:

Now these stories can be told better with strip drawings than with a story composed of sentences one after the other... To begin with, you can read a lot of exclamation marks and question marks spurting from our heads, and these mean we were looking at the bird full of amazement - festive amazement, with the desire on our part also to sing, to imitate that first warbling, and to jump, to see the bird rise in flight...

Here we can see the exercises in style that Calvino will become renowned for in his later works Invisible Cities and If On A Winter's Night A Traveller. The utilisation of the comic strip form reminds me of Alan Moore's famously long winded comic book scripts in which he outlines, down to the last detail, every aspect of the page that the illustrator will have to draw. There was definitely no coincidence that these stories were entitled Cosmi-comics. Both in the humourous sense and in Calvino's admiration for the comic book format.

The second section I didn't enjoy quite as much. It describes Qfwfq's love of a being named Priscilla through a rather dense storied explanation of a singled celled organisms journey through Mitosis, Meiosis, and Death. Although this part is still extremely clever, especially the beginning descriptions of a being with no knowledge of the concept of 'Other' suddenly urging to become two beings,  I feel it lacked some of the magic that Calvino showed in the earlier tales.

The final section abandons Qfwfq as a narrator and takes us through a journey of extremely Borgesian stories that focus on the infinite divisibility of space and time. To me I saw these stories as a modern fictional rendition of Zeno's paradoxes. In particular t zero representing Zeno's 'Arrow', and The Chase representing 'Achilles and the Tortoise'. In fact, others such as literary critic and huge Calvino fan, Gore Vidal, have mentioned that this final collection focuses too much on it's 'literariness':

In Cosmicomics Calvino makes it possible for the reader to inhabit a meson, a mollusk, a dinosaur; makes him for the first time see light ending a dark universe. Since this is a unique gift, I find all the more alarming the "literariness" of Time and the Hunter. I was particularly put off by the central story "t zero," which could have been written (and rather better) by Borges.

And to me some of the stories seemed to read more like an analytic philosophy paper than a work fiction. Take the first paragraph of t zero for example:

In a second I'll know if the arrow's trajectory and the lion's will or will not coincide at a point X crossed both by L and by A at the same second tx...

However, in The Night Driver Calvino is back to his best, and with an air of melancholy that is unusual to find in such a fun and lighthearted collection. It describes the never ending chase of a broken hearted man trying to find his estranged lover but, in an almost Kierkegaardian sense, being infinitely resigned to the idea of never reaching her due to the infinite divisibility of the space he will have to cross from point A to point B.

In conclusion, I will always be mesmerised by Calvino, and I still thoroughly enjoyed Time and the Hunter although it became a little bit more of a slog for me that the first collection had been. Calvino, much like his predecessor Jorge Luis Borges, has the ability to play with logic and fiction in a way that most storytellers can only dream of. I'll give the last word to Gore Vidal who thought of Calvino as a perhaps the most inventive and brilliant writer of the 20th century, and if it were not for my admiration for Borges who came before him, I may have to agree.

During the last quarter century Italo Calvino has advanced far beyond his American and English contemporaries. As they continue to look for the place where the spiders make their nests, Calvino has not only found that special place but learned how himself to make fantastic webs of prose to which all things adhere. In fact, reading Calvino, I had the unnerving sense that I was also writing what he had written; thus does his art prove his case as writer and reader become one, or One.

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13IOh...

[SeirenAthena · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite stories from this collection were fantastic and fascinating (my absolute favorites were all in the third part). Some were a bit dull at times, though—but broadly, I still quite liked this work as a whole. Calvino’s post-modern magic and scrutiny of life in his focused and experimental bubble were absolutely brilliant in some stories or just interesting in others. (The Chase and The Night Driver were incredible).

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

The short stories in Time & The Hunter are part of the Cosmicomics collection and therefore a reread. My review of The Complete Cosmicomics reflects the same feelings I have about Time & The Hunter.

But I will continue with a short review since The Complete Cosmicomics is, thus far, my favorite book of all time.

A hunter, his arrow, and the lion speak on our position in time.
A unicellular organism moves closer towards his love as he divides.
Calvino makes me fall in love with motions of the Moon that aren't even possible, but he makes me believe they are.

Calvino is able to personify scientific theories in ways that blow my mind. This is the only book where I can confidently say that I understand every word yet I understand none of it at all.

From "II. Meiosis":

"What each of us really is and has is the past; all we are and have is the catalogue of the possibilities that didn't fail, of the experiences that are ready to be repeated. A present doesn't exist, we proceed blindly toward the outside and the afterword, carrying out an established program with materials we fabricate ourselves, always the same."

[Wendy Li · Rating 3 out of 5]

Couldn’t finish this book despite effort.
Calvino’s work reads stream of consciousness regarding the topics of the beginning of the earth. I quite liked the imagery it painted but reading its was effortful and left me grasping for a plot which most times did not seem to exist. It’s quite an interesting genre of science fiction and reading it is akin to watching a dream - actually it’s akin to watching a bio majors’s dream.

I liked that true book is short and is a series of short stories. I think I was also trying to read this on the subway which didn’t mesh well because of the book. The book and descriptions are already quite lucid so with distractions and noises of a transit system is a sure fire way of losing the motivation to read the book.

[Martina Sušilović · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nije mi cijela bila loša, neke priče imaju baš zanimljiva uplitanja znanstvenog i znanstveno fantastičnog u svakodnevne radnje, a neke su mi stvarno bile teške za pratiti i jednostavno dosadne.

[Penguin's Shadow · Rating 3 out of 5]

Śmieszne, dziwne, ale nawet ciekawe!
Nigdy wcześniej nie czytałam czegoś takiego XD

[Ricki Fornera · Rating 2 out of 5]

Idee geniali ma racconti noiosi, tranne quello del Conte di Montecristo che merita

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of short stories that require careful reading to understand the underlying concepts and to experience his masterful manipulation of words and logic to achieve an effect. The first set of stories is good, the middle biological process group is weaker, and the final three are good. Calvino must have carefully studied math, logic, physics, and biology to determine what makes them tick and used their conceptual basis to write these very entertaining stories. (Complete side note: If you are looking for a visual to go along with these stories, mine was the weird and other-worldly backgrounds that haunted the 1960s animated Spiderman cartoons in the later part of the series. End side note)

The best stories:

The Soft Moon: The moon descends towards Earth and drops lunar material. It is “revealed” that the “plastic, enamel, rayon” etc. of our modern world is the original material that composed the Earth and that the “natural” material we currently see is really from the moon. However, there is some original Earth material on the moon, but it is old and has suffered from asteroid strikes, etc. A humorous aside is the narrator’s friend who decries how pathetic the moon is and how superior the Earth is. She also points out that while some of the descending moon material may damage individual lives (or portions of cities!) it���s all for the best and all perfectly logical and normal – no problem!

Crystals: The world is a battle between tightly disciplined crystals with their atoms lined up and the disarray of imperfect materials that are not crystal. Crystal is losing. The crystal remnants, like diamonds, are prisoners on silver and platinum chains, lying in velvet coffins in jewelry stores (an exceptional description). Order versus chaos and chaos is winning.

t zero: Maybe the best? An archer is shooting an arrow at a lion leaping through the air to attack him. The scene is frozen in time but the archer seems to have infinite time to analyze his situation. Will the arrow kill the lion or will it miss and the lion will kill him? Using pseudo-mathematical analysis to wonder what will happen as the scene progresses, he ponders time and space. He also uses analytical language that depersonalizes the scene and makes the predicament very abstract before then getting into the gory details of being torn apart and left for the vultures or images of the arrow striking the lion. It’s a nice, often humorous contrast. No one asked me, but I think the scene never changes: the archer, lion, and arrow are still stuck in time zero forever.

The Chase: The hunted becomes the hunter. The protagonist is in a car being pursued by an armed assailant in another car but they are stuck in city traffic. The protagonist thinks through how to improve his relative position so that his pursuer can’t shoot him. He has three types of adversaries: the pursuer, the line of cars that are in front of him and go too slowly through the green light, and the cross traffic that blocks his column of traffic from moving. The protagonist then goes on to rationalize that in the system he is in all cars are both pursued and pursuer; that he is pursuing someone else and that person is desperate to avoid him and move forward in the traffic jam. He finds his opportunity and shoots the person he is now pursing. The person pursing the protagonist, who seems to be pursuing him to prevent him from killing the person in front of the protagonist, no longer has a mission and halts the pursuit.

[Marina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Calvino o, dell’origine dell’universo.

La prima parte, Altri Qfwfq, riprende Le Cosmicomiche. Quattro brevi racconti in cui Qfwfq ci parla della formazione dei continenti, dell’origine degli uccelli, dei cristalli e del passaggio dal mare esterno, in cui i "corpi" (non ancora tali) fluttuano, al mare interno, il sangue. Racconti sospesi fra l’onirico e il darwiniano, con un protagonista-io narrante che scorre senza posa dalla condizione di progenitore di ogni essere vivente (pura cellula, o atomo) a quella di uomo contemporaneo alle prese con la vita moderna. La prosa è piacevolissima, a patto di lasciarsi andare, culla il lettore in quel flusso primordiale, avanti e indietro, come un mare calmo, ma un mare-non mare, primigenio.

In Priscilla ritroviamo ancora Qfwfq, che questa volta ci racconta la riproduzione cellulare, dalla mitosi alla meiosi alla morte, presentandola come un innamoramento con un sé che pure è altro da sé, pur non essendo altro.

E infine Ti con zero, l’ultima parte, composta di quattro racconti nei quali Calvino cerca di narrare la realtà attraverso la scientificità delle categorie logico-matematiche. Sono attimi in cui il tempo si ferma, ad esempio l’istante in cui un cacciatore aspetta che la freccia colpisca il leone o manchi il bersaglio, momenti fra la vita e la morte, in cui il tempo si ferma e diventa spazio.

Un libro ambizioso, che di certo richiede un lettore altrettanto ambizioso.

Uno di quei libri che, a detta del professore universitario che me lo aveva consigliato, un aspirante traduttore deve assolutamente leggere, senza focalizzarsi sul contenuto, ma lasciandosi portare dallo stile.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Italo Calvino is just a really good storyteller. As in, someone able to make any seemingly incongruous or dead-end idea come alive entirely through the telling, through the details he brings in. Here, somehow he's able to take all these very conceptual scientific-fact seeds and turn them into often oddly affecting personal dramas with neat formal tricks and thrilling narrative cartwheels. Cosmicomics worked on similar lines, okay, bascially exactly the same, but these are a little later and a few of these outshine much of that material.

The Soft Moon: drawing from some abortive 18th-century theory that the Earth's continents were fallen moon chunks, Calvino dives into the implications of a moon pliable enough to spill matter onto us, making it sound totally disgusting. And sets this cleverly at odds with his fictional earth origins and just runs and runs with this. It's great, economical, weird, lavishly described, totally surprising.

Blood, Sea: The circulatory system allows us to take saline blood, our ocean origins in miniature with us. This is a love story whose long sentences flip acrobatically between primordial waters and automotive present. It's hilarious and reads aloud excellently.

The Chase: a car chase in stalled traffic based on, I don't know exactly, field theory or something. It's pretty great.

And so on, the mathematics of the universe and the human heart. Calvino typically manages to write about real things through his games, which tethers these despite about the most playful touch that I can handle in fiction. But it totally works, marrying this to almost Borges-like post-modern cleverness at times. Only the middle section lags a bit.

[Anne Tucker · Rating 1 out of 5]

really not my kind of book at all - and i did try hard. Perhaps it was because it followed one thast blew me away ... but also it was far too clever and scientifically complicated for me. I really enjoyed Cosmicomics and especially Invisible Cities when I was much much younger, but this was very different.
The book takes a number of scientifuc propositions , Calvino turns them on their head and writes a mixture of scientific equations and implications, along with fantasy. For each tale, I started interested and engaged but after a page or so I was completely lost ... it had become just words and huge numbers of them. Occasionally I intuited some fabulous visual images but not nearly enough.

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

not as magical or charming as "Cosmicomics" -- ain't nothin' like the real thing, baby -- but all this talk about cosmology and supersonic highways made me think of a more romantic "Jetsons."

[Hojaplateada · Rating 5 out of 5]

Espectacular, aunque tiene una parte un poco complicada

[Margarete Maneker · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘The Soft Moon’ reminded me of the poem "Maria and Oceanus" by Erin Coughlin Hollowell. the moon as muse is fascinating—this satellite that pushes and pulls at us all, alternately goddess and false deity. the monstrosity and horror that the moon represents for the narrator contrasts with common poetic feelings regarding the moon (celestial, awe-inspiring) in a way that makes me want to re-examine lunar poems & writing.

‘Crystals’ really feels like Calvino at his best. that oscillation between one imagined world and another…..the interpolation of two idealized visions…..it is triumphantly poignant and incredibly morose, a familiar script of two beings passing each other in the night, never able to connect. makes me want to weep.

i love how timeless Qfwfq as a narrator and character feels—primordial but also wholly modern. somehow the reader is able to connect with this being and understand his contradictions and opinions, while also accepting the fantastical notion of his immortality. amorphous as he is, one identifies with him!

blood, sea = as within, so without

my most favorite section is the second, which expands on the theme of the previous story and plays with liminality in a really effective way. the focus on cellular structure is both minute and abstract; these three stories correspond and converse with one another so beautifully.

‘Mitosis’, my favorite of the entire collection, speaks to both interoceptive awareness and to the inner state of being that is constantly conflictive, the fear of change: “…yet there was always the repetition of that wrench of myself, of that picking up and moving out, picking myself up and moving out of myself, the yearning toward that impossible doing which leads to saying, that impossible saying that leads to expressing oneself, even when the self will be divided into a self that says and will surely die and a self that is said and that at times risks living on…” somehow here Calvino has penned words that sum up the crux of my existence.

“Priscilla and I are only meeting places for messages from the past” 🥲

the last section, with its temporal trajectories, built on the scientific language of the earlier stories in a really brilliant way: “each second is a universe, the second I live is the second I live in.” like Invisible Cities, i’m just awestruck by Calvino’s structuring, how he manages to create a thought-provoking through line between disparate shorts. and the themes shift through the collection, while still being in conversation with one another!!!!

[Smiley III · Rating 5 out of 5]

Better than Cosmicomics, or so I thought, this one actually has a (brief) epigram section that reminds me of the one that starts Gravity's RAINBOW -- "Everything summons us to death; nature, as if envious of the good she has done us, announces to us often and reminds us that she cannot leave us for long that bit of matter she lends us, which must not remain in the same hands, and which must eternally be in circulation: she needs it for other forms, she asks it back for other works."—Bossuet, Sermon sur la mort

"Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death."—Werner von Braun

If transformation's what you want, it's what you'll get in this book: you'll be shrunk down to the microscopic level, and made to personify beings that aren't even formed yet, and have (almost) no right to use the word "being" to claim themselves as a coherent self — that's the point. At times, you may be reminded to Robbe-Grillet's fastidiousness in relating detail, and what it does for evocativeness and conveying consciousness — you feel like you're driving on the cloverleaf, underpass (in that part . . . ), and become aware you're chasing someone in your car, as much as being chased in yours. It's my favorite part.

(For a short book, you'll get a mind-bend. Why not read it??)

Over and OUT ...

-EJB/Orwell

(past LIVES)

#REINCARNATION

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

my favorite writer of the conditional, beings times and places that may have and could still shift and rush you (and slow you) into other lives, other loves, other realities, other selves…

this is the most complex writing of calvino’s i’ve read in my short time as one of his devoted readers because what he does to and within his sentences is absolutely mind-blowing. i read this collection (novel?) over the course of five months, returning again and again especially to the ideas of the vital and strange fluidity of the internal/external, within/without. i found myself getting closer and closer to a core while coursing with the sensation of zooming ever outward: reading this book is like traveling in space, and there is clarity in the distance, and closeness in the distance. and he writes of all the themes that are most important to me and probably all others who share in a literary-fueled existence: the enigma and miracle of time’s velocity and passing, love’s encounters, homesickness, the wonderful fragile wings of the imagination…

a feat of language!