Cosmicomics

Surreal. That's just really the best word to describe Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, a book of short stories that ask you to suspend not just disbelief, but also your instinct for internal logic. Most fiction, however fanciful, follows whatever laws its created for its own world. Cosmicomics does not subject itself to such constraints. The stories explore what it might have been like to witness various eras in the history of the universe, from the very beginning, when there was absolutely nothing (so how could there have been a witness, the narrator?), to the social embarassment of having an uncle who hadn't yet evolved from fish to land-animal, to being the last dinosaur in the emerging era of mammals (and catching a train out of town). The stories are dreamy in that sense. Non sequitors abound and yet, for the duration of the story, make perfect sense, just as in dreams. There is also a great deal of semiotics woven in through the stories--for some of them the relationships between sign, idea, meaning, dissemination really form the backbone of the story. The narrator, who is the same voice throughout the eras, is obsessed with the representation of himself. He wants others, of course, to think well fo him. He wants them to see him the version of him that he imagines as his best self. But representations, signs, are tricky things, and his efforts often backfire as the sign moves beyond him and begins to behave, to be interpreted, in ways other than what he intended. And what can you do then, except make yet another sign and hope it comes closer to your perceived truth?