“Seen from the Earth, you looked as if you were hanging there with your head down, but for you, it was the normal position, and the only odd thing was that when you raised your eyes you saw the sea above you, glistening, with the boat and the others upside down, hanging like a bunch of grapes from the vine.” Check out a couple of my favorite quotes from the book: Calvino is doing more than telling stories here, he’s testing the language and wielding it with poetic mastery. But Calvino’s writing is certainly romantic, by which I also mean that it is generally beautiful and lush and captivating and whimsical. The general lesson in love seems to be that we want what we can’t have rather than what’s available, and the romance is more an intriguing side force pushing through the story rather than the main focus. There were a few times I wanted to call it (well-done) magical realism, and underlying it all there’s incredible romance. Certainly some sort of sci-fi/fantasy collection, but readers who don’t usually like sci-fi shouldn’t be afraid to read this book. It’s difficult to classify exactly what I would say this book is. This one I read straight through, and the four pieces seemed like stories that should be read together. I mean, granted, the whole book is less than 60 pages, but even so I usually take breaks between the stories/speeches etc. I can say that this whole collection felt like an accessible lesson in astrology, with things like gravity, life spans of stars, and the big bang transformed into fantastical fiction that I just couldn’t put down once I’d started. I know embarrassingly little about astrology, and I can’t say for sure whether the italicized paragraphs preceding each of the stories in this book are true scientific facts or not. I have read a few of his short stories before picking up this volume, but I still wasn’t prepared for what I found here. Italo Calvino is the sort of writer I could follow anywhere. exploding, the fate of all cosmic matter. Through Qfwfq and our narrator(s), these stories explore Earth in a time when the moon could be touched from its surface (“The Distance of the Moon”), at a time when Earth was not yet fully formed and lacked color (“Without Colours”), in modern times as an ancient family prepares for the sun to burn out (“As Long as the Sun Lasts”), and separate from Earth entirely as the narrator considers the pros and cons of imploding vs. But first, I read Italo Calvino’s The Distance of the Moon, a set of short fictional stories involving astrology.Ībout the book: Qfwfq is a fount of stories, having apparently lived several billion years in our solar system and held on to remarkable memories of his cosmic experiences. My next 6 are already on their way to my mailbox. But in the meantime…) I read another Penguin Modern! This is the 4th of the 6 I bought first, and I’m going to read the last two before the end of March and then take a little break from them. (Are you tired of my Penguin Modern excitement yet? I promise I’ll cool it after this month.