Time and the Hunter [Paperback]

The first and second parts of the book consists of seven more of the tails of one of Calvino's most intriguing characters - the bizarre and all pervading qfwfq who has narrated a whole sequence of stories - the others being found in Cosmicomics, which consists entirely of his yarnings. He tells his stories almost like some old man relaxing among friends in an exclusive club somewhere - but what stories!! In Time and the Hunter he lazily recalls his experiences with a remarkably soft moon and how he flew with the first of the birds. He tells a sadly poignant story of an ancient phase of the earth where the world is crystalline and a story about life in a comforting sea of blood. Elsewhere (in Cosmicomics) he recalls firsthand accounts of the first atoms (and of the fine games he used to play with them!), of what life was like in a singularity, of complex games of racing galaxies and of life as a snail. Obviously this is surrealism of the most wonderful sort - but if so then it is what I can only call scientific surrealism! Calvino will take the most unimaginable aspects of history, science and physics and weave his tales around them. Sometimes they are hilariously comic - and others almost unbearably sad. They are told with exquisite, clean precision - very approachable and readable in spite of their mind-stretching strangeness. They will have you laughing to yourself at the sheer audaciously strange vision of it all - and perhaps shed a tear or two as well!

The last part of Time and the Hunter didn't grab me quite so immediately and easily as the opening tales. The final section, T-Zero, is a collection of four texts, quite difficult to read with their scientific stream of consciousness style - riddled with something like mathematical equations and exhausting sentence structure. But they still make interesting reading if you can enter into the strange spirit of them. Few things Calvino has ever written, however, can come up to the standard of the qfwfq stories!

The short stories contained in this slim volume are divided into three sections. Within the first two parts, each of the well-crafted miniatures is narrated by an obscure character known to us only as Ofwfq, who seems to take many forms. Essentially they are a series of what ifs (as, I guess, is most fiction); each takes an interesting scientific theory and runs away with it in an imaginative and figurative sense. So, for example, the first tale deals with an Earth where the Moon is not yet her satellite, but a planet in her own right and how our present state of affairs came to be. Similarly, the second tale deals with the origin of birds, the third the development of gemstones, the fourth our evolution from creatures of the sea to land dwellers (where he speculates that the blood that flows inside us is actually the equivalent of the sea that surrounded us before) and so on and so forth. Thus they all deal with themes of change, of order arising from chaos (including speculation about what exactly consitutes order) and the inadequacy of mere words in describing these wondrous things. For, it can be clearly seen, Calvino has never lost his sense of wonder at our world and the way it came to be.

To read each of these stories, then, is to enter another, parallel universe where things are similar to our familiar surroundings and yet wholly different. Calvino's imaginative range is extraordinary - it covers the whole of time and space! Clearly, he is a deep philosopher and an intelligent scientific thinker, for logic and philosophical conjecture feature highly in each of these tales. Especially, perhaps, in tzero. Here, he expertly builds up the tension in that moment between a hunter letting an arrow fly and it possibly hitting its leonine target, while also speculating about parallel universes and whether or not if an event happens in a place often enough it leaves some sort of echo causing déjà vu in those who recreate it. While the philosophy and the science can be difficult, it is certainly worth the perseverance as this volume of stories is a very rewarding reading experience.

In the last part he changes tack slightly. While considering relativity and our concepts of the space that surrounds us, he deftly throws in a story about a thwarted car chase (they are in a traffic jam) where the murderer has to just sit tight until the traffic flows freely once more (with a neat twist at the end) and a retelling of the Count of Monte Cristo. These last two read much more easily than the preceding stories and so provide some form of light relief which you may well require by this point.

I have never read more literate, lyrical, thought provoking science fiction. These stories are quite, quite stunning. Step into the world of Calvino, you will be pleasantly surprised.