A collection of pieces which are really more imaginative excursions than short stories, for all that they do have identifiable protagonists and at least the outlines of narratives, and as such the obvious comparison is Invisible Cities. And indeed, the two books turn out to have a lot more in common than their superficially different subject-matters initially suggest (a series of descriptions of fabulous cities visited by Marco Polo, framed by longer philosophical conversations between the Venetian explorer and the emperor Kublai Khan, versus Qfwq's by turns breathless and oddly matter of fact accounts of crucial moments in cosmic 'history').
Ultimately, I think, Cosmicomics is principally concerned with the creative and productive forces that, for Calvino, drive Everything; the literary device of representing these both literally and anthropomorphically functions on at least two levels, one purely metaphorical (and playful), the other suggesting more profoundly that we can only make sense of such cosmic happenings (or circumstances) by way of metaphor (something like, 'if no one can imagine the big bang, did it really happen - and what does it mean to say that we can imagine it?')...and as such, it's fundamentally concerned with the theatre of the imagination, and the implications of what transpires there. For example, this, which closes "The Spiral", the final piece in the collection:
And at the bottom of each of those eyes I lived, or rather another me lived, one of the images of me, and it encountered the image of her, the most faithful image of her, in that beyond which opens up, past the sem-liquid sphere of the irises, in the darkness of the pupils, the mirrored hall of the retinas, in our true element which extends without shores, without boundaries.
If that is what Calvino's about here (and it's not clear that it is), then no wonder that he only partly succeeds. I found Cosmicomics interesting to read, but it doesn't approach the limpid perfection of Invisible Cities - it may be missing the point to insist on the book having a point, but nonetheless I felt it lacked a clarity of focus, something to raise it above the level of a diverting, even often entertaining, play of ideas to being something more.
(Incidentally, book club rode again with this one after a long hiatus - a hot day upstairs in AB's current North Carlton apartment, WL joining us by skype from the UK.)
