That's not to say that all the stories read the same way, of course. In story after story, Calvino displays the same singular talent for wresting the profound from the absurd. At the same time, Calvino manages to build from this cluster of sight gags a moving reflection on chaos and order. "We would see an object approaching from the depths of space, fluttering like a bird," Qfwfq says, "then later we'd find out it was a sock." Carpets, copies of the Quran, the Mexican volcano Paricutin - they all just hurtle to Earth and pile up, building the world as we know it out of mismatched knickknacks and landmarks. That means a first encounter with clever fables like "The Meteorites," in which Calvino imagines an early version of Earth as a tiny ball with only two people on it, picking up dust and junk as it flies through space. Finally, after decades, and after a few years where it was published only in the U.K., The Complete Cosmicomics is now available on American shores. This means that Martin McLaughlin, our trusty translator this go-around, has even brought seven of them into English for the first time. Whereas Rushdie recommended just the 12 stories in Calvino's first book, and Weaver's and Parks' translations once lived separately in several different volumes, finally all of the cosmicomic stories have been set down in the same place. Now, as a general rule, I don't think it's a good idea to compete with Rushdie - but, just this once, this review has something more to offer: that is, the entire collection. Literary titan Salman Rushdie even took to the air on NPR six years ago with just one recommendation: Pick up a copy of Calvino's Cosmicomics. After Calvino's death, Tim Parks translated others. The bulk of these stories were translated from Italian into English during his lifetime by William Weaver. Before Calvino's death in 1985, he wrote 34 cosmicomics, collecting many of them in various books over the span of two decades. Most of these stories aren't new, after all. Then again, though, you might know this already. Affable and bumbling, they meet the unimaginable as a matter of course. They display powers fit for Greek gods, riding galaxies and defying death, but not so much because they break boundaries as because they're utterly oblivious to them. His characters - especially his frequent narrator, an unpronounceable codger named Qfwfq - scoop milk from the moon, quibble before the Big Bang and fall forever along the curve of space. They aspire to nothing less than the creation of an entirely new genre, usually taking for a foundation a difficult scientific or mathematical concept and twisting it into a nimble and often hilarious plot. Calvino's "cosmicomic" tales, a batch of short stories that he wrote mostly in the '60s, don't much care for logic and limitation. It's a hasty disclaimer, but one that makes plenty of sense in this case. This will happen sometimes when you're inventing worlds and ideas that can't be put into words.īut words are all he's got - so deal with it. But it's best not to let it slow us down, he suggests. Oh, and the same goes for what's to come. Halfway through a story, or even a few sentences in, he often pauses - briefly, glibly - to mention in passing that everything he has written so far is wrong. Italo Calvino has a habit that's hard not to find disconcerting. You Must Read This Rushdie On Calvino's Absurd, Charming Masterpiece