‘The Complete Cosmicomics’
FSG Book Keeping asked authors to write about a childhood favorite or a book they considered to be an ancestor to theirs. Tim Finch on ‘The Complete Cosmicomics’
At first glance, The Complete Cosmicomics might sound as if I’ve plumped for a childhood favourite. The title has the ring of one of those collections of sci-fi picture books which appeal to young boys. And maybe for the truly precocious youngster—I was not such a creature—the book might just work its magic. Yet even if this is true, this collection of scintillatingly brilliant short stories by the Italian writer Italo Calvino is a trillion light years from comic book trash.
Gore Vidal has described Cosmicomics as “entirely unlike anything that anyone else has written,” while Salman Rushdie praised it as “the most joyful reading experience of your life.” Dan Dare or Iron Man it is not. Rather we are talking the highest possibility of high fiction.
For a start, the “super hero” of the stories is a Hollywood-treatment-defying, CGI-confounding conundrum. Qfwqy—yes, that’s “his” name—who, despite being present at all points in cosmic history from the Big Bang to, well, presumably the other Big Bang (the one that ends the possibility of literature as we know it),is a gentle, ironic, laconic, romantic commentator on the “universe and everything” and all its possibilities. There’s nothing all-action about him.
He is witness to and participant in every event in the imaginable past and future because he is variously a micro-speck of dust, a single-cell organism, a fishy crawler out of the primordial soup, a theoretical possibility of physics, a planet, a universe . . . you name it. Yet he is palpably one of us. He finds the world he is confined in deadly dull, but then fears and shrinks from life-changing possibility. He has difficult family relationships and failed love affairs. He wonders what it all means and yet just gets on with everyday life. He is grumpy and funny and humdrumly human.
Of course in Qfwqy’s case, tribulations might involve losing for eternity his sister G’d(w)n who “thanks to her introverted nature . . . loved the dark” when the sun first starts to flood the cosmos. And in the beautiful and touching story “Without Colours,” he is parted from his lover, Ayl, in a conscious echo of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, when “telluric shocks” crack open the planetary surface and he embraces earthly creation while she cowers inside the grey core. At other times though he is just bored or baffled even as the universe expands infinitely (or collapses in on itself) around him.
So how on earth (or indeed how beyond earth’s constraints) have Cosmicomics been an influence on my own writing? The answer is: not at all directly. But from Cosmicomics, above all the fiction I have ever read, I realised (rather lamentably late in life) that realism is but one path to follow. So great is the great tradition’s hold on contemporary fiction that to escape its gravitational pull takes a huge effort of will and skill, and it is perhaps best that inexperienced writers venture out beyond its orbit only so far. (I certainly make no great claims for The House of Journalists as barrier-breaking experimental fiction.) But in the hands of a master, why should there be any limits on where a story can take us? Why just write about the world you know when you could write about any other world you could possibly imagine? It is a hugely liberating thought, and Calvino along with others such as Borges and Beckett, because they dare to go there, are a challenge and a delight to all writers.
And for readers? It is still the case perhaps that too much is made by teachers and commentators of the challenge of such fiction, when much more should be made of the delight. With reference to the literary giants quoted above, think Rushdie before Vidal, I’d say. Because the main reason for reading Cosmicomics is not because it breaks new ground in fiction but because it is simply huge fun.
TIM FINCH works for a London think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research. He was a BBC political journalist and is a former director of communications for the Refugee Council. FSG publishes his novel, The House of Journalists, this month.
