I first heard about Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics in a New Yorker podcast. Some author read one of his stories and I was intrigued. When I saw an English language copy of the collection in a bookstore in Copenhagen (read it before NPR, bitchez!) a year later, I decided to buy it and check it out. It is quite an imaginative collection, with setting in all stages of the universe expertly composed and translated, many of which were delightfully meta and fantastic.
However timeless they may feel, or the subject matter is, it was very difficult to forget the time in which these stories were written, and the perspective of learned Italian men such as Calvino. Calvino famously believed that there was nothing more to do with traditional realism, thus he turned to other sources of inspiration. He may have been right, in terms of the Western white male perspective, that is. Women and other minorities have plenty to add to the traditional realism canon. This just goes to show Calvino's limited point of view, even as he writes stories with seemingly unlimited possibilities.
This most often took shape with a heteronormative male/female dichotomy, even when the characters aren't human! I suppose this makes sense given that the characters are also anthropomorphized, and as this was originally written in the highly gendered language of Italian, such a dichotomy
is inevitable, but it became so lazy and tiresome after a while. Calvino could have been even more imaginative in this regard by refraining from using anthropomorphized or even gendered language at all. After all, not all species on Earth, let alone all the possible species that exist in the universe, have two sexes.
I realize these stories tend to have a mythical feel, where the same shit often went on, but it was too often the story of a presumed male character in pursuit of a female character. Though the settings and ideas put forth were drastically different, the plot would be the same. It got on my nerves at times, that the female was always the pursued and preferred things the way they were before (which somehow imparted some wisdom on the male character) and hardly ever the one to take action herself. In some instances, one could argue that Qwfwq is an unreliable narrator, or that it's not been the same incarnation of Qwfwq, per se (this would explain why no other names recur). At the very least, we can't take his opinions of other characters' motivations at face value.One that particularly stood out to me in a bad way was "The Soft Moon," an otherwise excellent story providing an alternative history of how the earth and moon came to be. There is another female character who is calm and expectant even as the world around them crumbles, and we flash forward to what the world looks like circa the 1970s, and right up until the last line of the story I'm there. But that last line... Qwfwq better be an unreliable narrator, bitter from a bad breakup, because the last line creates a caricature that completely flies in the face of Sylvia's character up until then. It made me so mad I stopped reading for a few days, because I would like to hear someone justify the reason for that line.
Most of the other stories I wasn't jazzed about didn't have such offensive lines of prose as that one did, but it started to become the same story over and over. At least in "Night Driver," the weak love pursuit premise dissolves into a pure thought experiment, devoid of any traditional trappings of story at all. The last few additions to the collections, like "Nothing and Not Much" and "Implosion," exist in the grander universe and bring up some though-provoking concepts while giving us settings and character forms I had never come across before. The stories really do improve, in my view, over time, when they're not so fixated on one-sided amorousness.
But there are instances where I find it difficult to excuse such blatantly male-centered storytelling in stories that don't even necessitate gender. It just ain't my thing. Hence I'm not a big fan of the first collection or the first part of "Time and the Hunter." Once I got into "Priscilla", the stories became more varied and interesting, relying less on the pursuit of woman plot. I much preferred "Spirals" to "The Spiral" - they were pretty much the same story but the former was more conceptually developed and experimental while the latter relied on the desire trope that I just got tired of.
This is not to say that I didn't enjoy the collection; I enjoyed the "Priscilla" trilogy and the new stories from "World Memory," among others. Many were the kind of heady, out-of-this-world stories that I like from that era. But whenever a so-called love story became apparent, I just thought, "Here we go again." As always, the presumed male character was the actor, the driving force in these stories, whereas the female characters did not so much at all, except settle down with another male character.
So overall, not a bad collection of stories. I more highly recommend the latter parts of "Time and the Hunter" and the later stories, as opposed to the original "Cosmicomics." They're all very imaginative and full of wonder but if you're a feminist you might get annoyed, so don't read them all at once. It remains that these otherwise visionary tales fall short due to Calvino's patriarchal and heteronormative views, which certainly took away from my ability to fully enjoy this collection. I give it just three stars for not being imaginative enough.
