I first came across Italo Calvino several years ago when I was lent his short story collection Cosmicomics, in which cosmogonical tales are presented as brief, witty, and often touching anecdotes. A kind of dream-logic permeates Cosmicomics and allows Calvino to place hot-headed, bickering human characters at the centre of events like the Big Bang or the solidification of the Solar System, often creating an air of tragedy, humour, and farce.
Since then I’ve read a few other Calvino novels, of which Marcovaldo was my favourite despite (or perhaps because of) its lack of obvious intellectual ambition. But it’s only recently that I’ve got round to reading t zero, the successor to Cosmicomics.
The first few pieces in t zero are very familiar. Calvino’s Cosmicomics protagonist reminisces about when the Moon’s surface dripped on to the Earth and formed the continents, about how the birds came to us from an inverted land of impossible creatures, and why the crystalline potential of the planet, once so promising, eventually came to nothing.
After this set of stories, however, Calvino diverges from the Cosmicomics model, becoming more philosophical than fantastical. Human love is described from the point of view of our ancient unicellular ancestors, for whom reproductive potential was inherent rather than external. In ‘Mitosis’, a single-celled organism is on the verge of the division that will mark, on one hand, the achievement of its life’s goal and, on the other, its annihilation. A big theme of this section is the inversion of how internal and external worlds have become inverted as life has developed, with the blood inside our bodies replicating the ancient warm oceans in which our ancestors once swam.
The final section of t zero is very different from Cosmicomics. Its stories are far less cosmic – instead, they take single situations, wholly or partially frozen in time, and examine them systematically and mathematically. In my favourite story, ‘The Chase’, the protagonist is being pursued in his car by an unknown, murderous aggressor, but they have both become ensared in urban gridlock. Trapped in the “pseudospace” of the traffic jam, the physics governing their pursuit are at first crippled, then nullified, then finally fragmented in a conclusion reminiscent of Paul Auster’s more metaphysical output.
Cosmicomics, like Marcovaldo, was a collection of interlinked and stylistically similar stories – but t zero is very different. The three sections differ markedly from one another in theme and style, meaning that there’s far less consistency – but who says collections of short stories need to be consistent? With the exception of the final story, ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ (which is too obviously a homage to Borges), t zero displays the same mix of lyricism, inventiveness and intelligence as Cosmicomics, without needlessly re-treading the same territory.
