The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino

£25.00
In stock
SKU
PG018

 UK Kirkus review
People die completing the Tour de France. This fact would normally be enough to put off any but the keenest of cyclists from attempting the route, but not so Tim Moore. This is a man who is unable to ride a bike without both hands firmly gripping the handlebars and yet his imagination becomes fired by thoughts of such an extreme physical challenge. After consulting some experts, he decides to tackle all 3630 km of the 2000 Tour in the month or so before the professionals depart. He sets off in high spirits, with nothing but a slathering of Savlon between him and the agony of a sweat-induced intimate infection. Along the way he finds himself battling against unhelpful tourist board officials, enraged pizza chefs, hostile hotel receptionists and a group of old men under the misapprehension that Roger Moore is his father. The leading Tour de France cyclists average 50 kilometres per hour, making Moore's 19.1 average seem decidedly puny, and he soon finds himself calling in the cavalry - in the guise of his profoundly unsympathetic wife and children. The result of his self-induced ordeal is the ultimate guidebook in how not to cycle long distances. Moore weaves accounts of his own heroic exploits with sobering, and sometimes infamous, tales about the race and the racers, and uses his brand of zany comedy to create a comic catalogue of misadventures. In a manner somewhat reminiscent of Bill Bryson, he persuades the reader to suffer bewilderment and frustration with him and to share his emotional highs and physical triumphs. Whether this book is likely to tempt the reader to undertake a similar challenge is doubtful, but that is hardly the point. Its purpose is to entertain and that it does in abundance. (Kirkus UK)

Product Description

Before the universe began to expand, when all of everything existed in a single point in space, Qfwfq was there. And afterwards - through the millennia, across galaxies and in different, shifting forms - he persisted. He has some stories to tell. This is a collection of enchanting stories, in revised translation, about the evolution of the universe. The characters, fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures, disport themselves amongst galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms, and have time for a love life too. 'Naturally, we were all there, - old Qfwfq said, - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?'.

'If you have never read Cosmicomics, you have before you ... the most joyful reading experiences of your life' - Salman Rushdie 'Entirely unlike anything that anyone else has written ... In Cosmicomics Calvino makes it possible for the reader to inhabit a meson, a mollusc, a dinosaur; makes him for the first time see light ending a dark universe ... During the last [part of the twentieth] century Italo Calvino ... advanced far beyond his American and English contemporaries. As they continue to look for the place where the spiders make their nests, Calvino has not only found that special place but learned how himself to make fantastic webs of prose to which all things adhere' - Gore Vidal, New York Review of Books

  • Book Binding

    Hardback

  • Book Format

    Unabridged

  • Book Genre

    Fiction

  • Book ISBN

    9780141189680

  • Book Page Count

    432

  • Book Publisher

  • Catalogue Ref

    TG017

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