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A review by daniella84
The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
3.0
A collection of little stories about love, the creation of the universe, fate and time. Sometimes I think it got a bit rambly but by the end they tied together really nicely! I think that the concepts of the stories I like as a whole but I found myself skimming certain sections cause they lost me. I'm also not used to reading short stories so I read it in pretty chunky blocks - perhaps the stories and their concepts are best read one or two at a time so you can think about them a lil bit
My favourite sections as wholes: Cosmicomics, Time and the Hunter Part 3, From World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories
My favourite stories: The Distance of the Moon, Without Colours, The Daughters of the Moon, Solar Storm, World Memory
Favourite Quotes:
"Once I even thought I saw the Moon come towards him, as he held out his hands." (p. 5)
"waking or sleeping - she abandoned herself to dreams" (p. 21)
"First I had believed that disappearing had been, for my brothers, the magnanimous acceptance of a defeat; now I knew that the more the Dinosaurs disappear, the more they extend their dominion, and over forests far more vast than those that cover the continents: in the labyrinth of the survivors' thoughts." (p. 110)
"Just outside the city there is that cloverleaf where all the motorways spread out, rushing over bridges that cross one another in spiral patterns, held up by cement pillars of different heights; you never know in what direction you're going as you follow the white arrows painted on the asphalt, and now and then you find the city you're leaving suddenly facing you, coming closer, patterned with squares of light among the pillars and the curves of the spiral. There was the Moon just above us: and the city seemed fragile to me, suspended like a cobweb, with all its little tinkling panes, its threadlike embroidery of light..." (p. 161)
"Therefore you can say that it's as if everything possible had already happened to me, including the possibility of its not happening..." (p. 227)
"What my parents programmed me to be in the beginning is what I am: that and nothing else...The story I wanted to narrate therefore is not only impossible to narrate but first of all impossible to live, because it's all there already, contained in a past that can't be narrated since, in turn, it's included in its own past, in the many individual pasts - so many that we can't really be sure they aren't the past of a species and of what existed before the species, a general past to which all individual pasts refer but which no matter how far you go back doesn't exist in the form of individual cases..." (p. 228)
"Each second is a universe, the second I live is the second I live in..." (p. 254)
"time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible" (p. 386)
My favourite sections as wholes: Cosmicomics, Time and the Hunter Part 3, From World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories
My favourite stories: The Distance of the Moon, Without Colours, The Daughters of the Moon, Solar Storm, World Memory
Favourite Quotes:
"Once I even thought I saw the Moon come towards him, as he held out his hands." (p. 5)
"waking or sleeping - she abandoned herself to dreams" (p. 21)
"First I had believed that disappearing had been, for my brothers, the magnanimous acceptance of a defeat; now I knew that the more the Dinosaurs disappear, the more they extend their dominion, and over forests far more vast than those that cover the continents: in the labyrinth of the survivors' thoughts." (p. 110)
"Just outside the city there is that cloverleaf where all the motorways spread out, rushing over bridges that cross one another in spiral patterns, held up by cement pillars of different heights; you never know in what direction you're going as you follow the white arrows painted on the asphalt, and now and then you find the city you're leaving suddenly facing you, coming closer, patterned with squares of light among the pillars and the curves of the spiral. There was the Moon just above us: and the city seemed fragile to me, suspended like a cobweb, with all its little tinkling panes, its threadlike embroidery of light..." (p. 161)
"Therefore you can say that it's as if everything possible had already happened to me, including the possibility of its not happening..." (p. 227)
"What my parents programmed me to be in the beginning is what I am: that and nothing else...The story I wanted to narrate therefore is not only impossible to narrate but first of all impossible to live, because it's all there already, contained in a past that can't be narrated since, in turn, it's included in its own past, in the many individual pasts - so many that we can't really be sure they aren't the past of a species and of what existed before the species, a general past to which all individual pasts refer but which no matter how far you go back doesn't exist in the form of individual cases..." (p. 228)
"Each second is a universe, the second I live is the second I live in..." (p. 254)
"time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible" (p. 386)