Reviews

The Distance of the Moon by Italo Calvino

risky_oak's review against another edition

Δείτε την κριτική στα Ελληνικά στις βιβλιοαλχημείες


So after the bitter disappointment with Calvino's [b:If on a Winter's Night a Traveller|143004|If on a Winter's Night a Traveller|Italo Calvino|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328210872l/143004._SY75_.jpg|1116802]
this Jägermeister shot of a book was Calvino's atonement, and mine as a reader.

I'm not a fan of these tiny books. They feel like those 30-days free trials. You only get a small taste of the whole work/service.


This less than 60 pages book contains four short stories. 2 of which I liked and 2 of which I found just okay.

These four short stories are part of a larger collection called [b:The Complete Cosmicomics|6018080|The Complete Cosmicomics|Italo Calvino|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327969031l/6018080._SY75_.jpg|79114386] with 34 short stories in total.
A combination of science fiction, magical realism, and fantasy.

Stories about the birth of galaxies the extinction of dinosaurs, the creation of our solar system, geological cataclysms and more.


So as a fan of the science theme in literature I want to buy the whole collection now, because as I was saying, with these tiny books you only experience the foreplay and not the whole act, that's the reason I'm not buying them, and that's the reason to look for the complete collection of the Cosmicomics, giving Calvino's one more chance to show me his talent in the craft.

wrenmeister's review against another edition

3.0

The titular story is the best.

sdoyon's review against another edition

funny reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

brittany746's review against another edition

2.0

This book is hard to describe. It was a little weird. I did like the first story where they could touch the moon and get milk from it, but my mind kept wandering while I was reading it. I get what the author was trying to do but It was a little too much for me.

kesterbird's review against another edition

5.0

This is one of my all time favorite short stories. I first read it in (was it Cosmicomics? Or another collection?) when my brother, then in college, gave me the book when he finished whatever class he had read it in. Pretty much all of the literature my brother handed me at that point I was rapt with, but Calvino stuck with me. This story occasionally gets played in my ears on some or other literature podcast, and every time I love it more.

annabend's review against another edition

challenging reflective medium-paced

• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

Italo Calvino's writing is beautiful and whimsical. He paints a luscious picture of his strange imagination. But the strong dollop of the male gaze was intrusive and annoying. I would have preferred the stories to stay as purely slice-of-life speculative fiction; they lost some of their luster when they approached something relatable and human.

balancinghistorybooks's review against another edition

2.0

I have not really been a fan of what I have read of Italo Calvino's work thus far, but went into this collection of 'exuberant, endlessly inventive stories' with an open mind nonetheless. The tales collected here - 'The Distance of the Moon', 'Without Colours', 'As Long As the Sun Lasts', and 'Implosion' - were published between 1965 and 2009, and have been variously translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks, and William Weaver. I found Calvino's work interesting enough, particularly with regard to the metaphors which he uses. There is some really imaginative imagery to be found here too. Overall, however, I found this collection - which hovers between the classifications of science fiction and fantasy - peculiar, and not to my taste. It is nothing which I would have chosen to read had it not been included in the Penguin Moderns Collection.

sputnik's review against another edition

5.0

FIVE STARS. I CAN'T ORGANIZE MY FEELINGS RIGHT NOW BUT THAT LAST ESSAY, IMPLOSION!!! i'm forever changed o____o

cooksbooks's review against another edition

5.0

Proof that science is beautiful and I'm not just a mega nerd

maiaceb's review against another edition

5.0

'Ayl was a happy inhabitant of the silence that reigns where all vibration is excluded; for her anything that looked likely to break the absolute visual neutrality was a harsh discord; beauty began for her only where the greyness had extinguished even the remotest desire to be anything other than grey.'

'I'll dig myself a niche amidst the hardest atoms, I'll tolerate flames of any colour, as long as I can finally get to that dead end, that siding, as long as I can reach the shore that nobody ever leaves again.'

'I shall implode, collapse inside the abyss of myself, towards my buried centre, infintely.'

'(...) ever existing form will break up in a blaze of heat, there is no entity can escape the irretrievable disorder of the corpuscles; time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.'