The Complete Cosmicomics By Italo Calvino, Penguin, £13.50

In an interview on television in 1968, the year he published the third collection of his Cosmicomic stories, Italo Calvino was asked why he had been saying that Galileo was the greatest Italian writer. Calvino replied that Galileo used language “not as a neutral utensil, but with literary awareness, with a continuous commitment that is expressive, imaginative and even lyrical”. Calvino then described how he sought out the passages in which Galileo speaks of the moon: “It is the first time that the moon becomes a real object for mankind, and is minutely described as a tangible thing, yet as soon as the moon appears one feels a kind of rarefaction, almost a levitation, in Galileo’s language. One rises with it into an enchanted state of suspension.” It was only natural for Calvino that Galileo was a keen reader of the poets, Ariosto and Tasso, “cosmic and lunary poet that he was”.

More familiar with the precise erotic puzzles of Difficult Loves, the gem-like pieces of fantastical allegory in Invisible Cities, and the light, effortless range and sharpness of Calvino’s critical writing, and never quite managing to fathom how some highly intelligent adults refused to outgrow science fiction and fantasy, I was not looking forward to reading The Complete Cosmicomics. But these nuggets of fiction (some of them not so much stories as intricate mind-games) that Calvino wrote and rewrote throughout the Sixties, continually arranging and rearranging them into different sequences, immediately drew me into their vortex of words, ideas and narratives. They kept me whirling and floating in there for three intense and breathless days, and then gently returned me to my everyday life like a celestial spin-dryer. I never felt that I was reading ‘science fiction’, for the best of these 30-odd stories, rather than projecting me into a dystopian fantasy located in the future, kept bringing me back to the stuff of my own body and to what the mind could be made to do, to their location in real space, and to the various kinds of time and history that converge in or open out from or behind them.

This time and this space, real as they were, seemed to exist in the stories on a scale — cosmic and plurimillennial — that I had never before presumed to associate with my own physical or subjective being. It had never occurred to me to project myself into the history of the universe in any actual and immediate sense. I never imagined that such an activity could become essential to my apprehension of the present, to the sensations that I carry every moment within my blood and bones. But Calvino’s narrator, unpronounceably called Qfwfq, whom I visualize as the blind old Borges sitting with his walking stick at the edge of the universe from the beginning of time and perhaps from even before, takes us through every conceivable kind of evolution — galactic, solar, terrestrial, biological, animal — as if that were the only context in which one could reflect by the fireside on life, death, desire, language, time, logic and art. Qfwfq’s eternal contemporaneity is at once a dizzying intellectual and imaginative exercise and a licence to indulge in one of the most primal of pleasures, that of telling and being told stories.

Reading this book took me back to two early experiences: growing up with Ray’s Professor Shonku and reading Paradise Lost for the first time as an undergraduate. The madcap down-to-earthness of Ray’s professor, who sets no limits to what can be known, imagined or brought about on an ordinary day, and Milton’s transformation of doctrinal ‘truth’ by the depth and range of the human imagination: both have a profound affinity to the cosmos of these stories. It is Calvino’s achievement to render pointless any attempt at distinguishing myth from fiction, and both from scientific truth and hypothesis, to separate the comic and the cosmic, Shonku from Satan, Galileo from Ovid, Dante and Ariosto, or Newton from Milton. For Calvino in the Sixties, this was an escape from the neo-realism of his early fiction towards a universe that was of its time, given the Sixties’ obsession with exploring space and putting man on the moon. It was also a return to what he called “the true but forgotten source” of the Italian tradition, going back through Galileo to Dante: “the notion of the literary work as a map of the world and of the knowable, of writing driven by a thirst for knowledge that may by turns be theological, speculative, magical, encyclopedic, or may be concerned with natural philosophy or with transfiguring, visionary observation.”

Another Italian I was continually reminded of while reading this book is Fellini. In the universe’s journey from undifferentiated nothingness to infinite and ever-evolving diversity, one unifying principle is desire. Even when the first cells desire one another, or when two molluscs fall in silent, eyeless love with each other, this endlessly varied theme of desire remains much more than reproduction or sex in the stories. It becomes the universal principle of Eros, like the two Venuses in Plato’s Symposium, brought to life there by one of the greatest writers of comedy in Socrates’ time. In Calvino’s stories, the cells and molluscs, or the various forms of male and female life that feel desire and reproduce, never cease to be what they literally are. Yet they are also unabashedly anthropomorphized, letting Calvino create a splendid range of unforgettable women who are at once other (often earlier) forms of life, actual women and recognizable comic-realist types straight out of Amarcord, La Dolce Vita, Juliet of the Spirits, La Strada or 8½. From the brittle and evanescent Maddalena to the luscious sex-goddess in the fountain, from the rumba-dancing Saraghina with her gigantic thighs to the mythic Mammas with their immense mammaries, Calvino gives us the entire range.

Here is the universally desired Mrs Ph(i)Nko from “All At One Point”. She existed billions of years ago, when all the universe’s matter was concentrated at a single point. The men loved this state of being, for it allowed them total proximity to Mrs P. And when space suddenly began to expand, they lamented having to detach and distance themselves from her. But Mrs P hated never having enough space to be fully herself. Calvino gives her possibly the longest, and greatest, sentence in the book. “It was enough for her to say, at a certain moment: ‘Oh, if I only had some room how I would like to make some tagliatelle for you boys!’ And in that moment we all thought of the space that her round arms would occupy moving backwards and forwards with the rolling pin over the dough, her bosom leaning over the great mound of flour and eggs, which cluttered the white board while her arms kneaded and kneaded, white and shiny, with oil, up to the elbows; with thought of the space that the flour would occupy, and the wheat for the flour, and the fields, to raise the wheat, and the mountains from which the water would flow to irrigate the fields, and the grazing lands for the herds of calves that would give their meat for the sauce; of the space we could take for the Sun to arrive with its rays, to ripen the wheat; of the space for the Sun to condense from the clouds of stellar gases and burn; of the quantities of stars and galaxies and galactic masses in flight through space which would be needed to hold suspended every galaxy, every nebula, every sun, every planet, and at the same time we thought of it, this space was inevitably being formed, at the same time that Mrs Ph(i)Nko was uttering these words: ‘…ah what tagliatelle, boys!’ the point that contained her and all of us was expanding in a halo of distance in light-years and light-centuries and billions of light-millennia, and we were being hurled to the four corners of the universe…, and she, dissolved into I don’t know what kind of energy-light-heat, she, Mrs Ph(i)Nko, she who in the midst of our closed, petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, ‘Boys, the tagliatelle I would make for you!’, a true outburst of general love, initiating at the same moment the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs Ph(i)Nkos, scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading with floury, oil-shiny, generous arms, and she lost at that very moment, and we mourning her loss.”