153pp
2/11 - 3/02
Calvino's always good for a change of pace. I've only ever really loved one of his books, If on a winter's night a traveler..., but I expect to continue gradually working my way through his body of work, one wild experiment at a time. I seem to be averaging one per year.
This is a collection of short stories, each narrated by "Qfwfq," who transmigrates across a number of forms--well, sometimes explicitly lacking "form"--over the aeons. It's sort of like a set of fables concerned with equations, simple lifeforms, and points in space, instead of barnyard animals.
Qwfwq and his similarly unpronounceable fellow-characters behave in pretty much human ways. Thus we have xenophobia among dinosaurs, jealousy among dense patches of stellar dust, and love among sightless molluscs. It's simultaneously an exploration of our tendency to invest the inanimate with human attributes--seeing a grinning mouth in the grill of a car--and an exercise in storytelling from a radically unfamiliar perspective. I was a little reminded of some old Asimov story about two-dimensional amoebic forms.
I have previously commented on the Harcourt Brace line of Calvino books, with their rather straightforward illustrations for the cover. This one is no exception, taking for its subject the book's first story, which was more of a fairy tale and didn't quite fit with the rest. You can't tell from the front, but the spines of these books all have this uniform band of colors, so that lined up on your shelves they look like a tasteful rainbow, or an array of paintswatches. My three other Calvino's just happen to be different shades of aubergine--conveniently enough for a guy who painted his shelves purple for no good reason--but this one's a brownish-goldenrod that ruins the scheme I had going.
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