Book Thoughts: Cosmicomics
After my brush with Borges was been seeking a similarly interesting collection of short stories, thinking that surely his works had inspired generations of writers of works with a similar dreamlike oddness and intellectual mouthfeel.
Apparently not!
While many such strange and dreamlike stories have been authored across many authors, it doesn't seem any one author has been selected by the internet as "Borges 2.0" -- and so I turned to the best possible source for a recommendation on where to go next: A used bookstore worker.
After a very engaging (and enthusiastic -- support your local bookstores!) conversation I was recommended Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, a collection of short stories that explore the universe and history through fantastical, fairytale-esque comical stories.
It is certainly a unique set of stories, entirely unlike anything I've read before. Calvino starts with an interesting scientific or pseudo-scientific concept such as "before the big bang the universe was concentrated into a single point" and plays with it through his immortal narrator "Qfwfq" who proceeds to bemoan how hard it was "back then" when all one's stuff and all one's neighbors were literally on top of one another. Using absurd extrapolation and willful misinterpretations we get scenes of the protagonist hopping from Earth to the moon (because it used to be much much closer, you know), and many other wild tales.
While the ideas present were often very fun, the collection ultimately wasn't for me. While I found many grins in the reading, the fairytale approach to storytelling felt too lawless for my tastes. I enjoyed the whimsey and poetry of some of the concepts and stories, but ultimately found the absence of universal consistency made surprises feel cheap rather than profound or interesting -- though every individual story's core concept was always delightful.
A handful of stories in the collection I did truly love -- though these tended to be a slightly different vein than the rest of the collection. The Chase features a simple setup of a narrator in a car-chase moving at the speed of rush-hour traffic. The Count of Monte Cristo explores an interesting jailbreak scenario. These were much smaller constructed worlds which felt more finite and tightly purposeful or allegorical.
I didn't love all of Cosmicomics, but the bits I did like were wonderful, basking in the whimsey was fun for a time, and the reading helped me better define what kinds of literary thought experiments keep me engaged. I need to keep searching to pinpoint exactly what it is that I loved in Borges' fictions, and I have definitely come closer.
If funny-yet-poetic modern cosmic creation myths & fables told from the first person perspective of a primordial (yet very Italian) god sounds intriguing to you, this is very likely the only place you're going to find that.