By Italo Calvino
This is a short story collection, which I bought in Edinburgh in Transreal Fiction, in mid-April 2024.
It’s wonderful. The stories are vastly imaginative, and I think can best be classified as poetic sci-fi. There are four stories, each of which takes a fact about the world and spins it into a wonderful fantasy story incorporating real motifs.
The first uses the fact that the Moon used to be closer to the Earth and spins off a story about kids climbing up to the Moon every month to gather moon-milk, only to find that the Moon is getting further and further away, and will soon be inaccessible completely. This with a side plot of the narrator being infatuated with the boat captain’s wife, who is infatuated with one boy who can understand the Moon like no-one else, with the wife eventually leaving the Earth and staying on the Moon forever.
The second is an unbelievably poetic one, using the fact that the Earth’s atmosphere provides protection from UV to spin a story about the Earth initially having no atmosphere and being colourless. The narrator falls for a girl and chases her over the bleak Earth, but when an atmosphere arrives, pooling around his feet and bringing blazing oranges and vibrant violets, the girl is distraught and leaves the surface to go underground, separated from the narrator by the only thing that reminds him of her: a grey stone wall.
The third is a comedic story, drawing on the life-cycles of stars to describe a family settling in the Solar System because the Sun is young and will blaze for billions of years, not like those short-lived and flashy blue giants. It’s equal parts an exploration of star lives, and a marriage portrait of a husband who wants to settle, a wife who is constantly restless, and how they’d miss each other terribly if they each got what they wanted.
The final story is a poetic monologue, comparing implosions (black holes) and explosions (novae, white holes) to emotional states. The narrator describes himself as an introvert, someone who bottles everything and compresses it to a black-hot ball burning at his core. He conjures up his hypothetical opposite, and ponders on whether their experiences are truly any different, before closing with a resolute and resigned “I go on digging my hole, in my mole’s burrow”.
Overall, just wonderful.