Photography, Creative Writing and Reviews

I felt compelled to tell you about a beautiful and extraordinary little book that I found, completeley by chance in this cute little pocket edition (picture attached).

It’s called Cosmicomics, by Italo Calvino, but don’t be mistaken, it is purely written word.

It’s format is a series of micro-stories that despite their breavity, span light years and millenia, tackling complex subjects like the formation of abstract concepts in the early days of the universe and the doomed relationships of star-crossed lovers that begin before colours have entered the world and end when light illuminates the beauty of Earth’s vistas.

The first story is beautifully dream-like, telling of a time where the Earth and the moon were so close together that humans could row their boats out to sea at night and clamber up onto the luna surface.

The writing style is both cinematic and like a written history. It is also deliberately abstract and strange with its tales about the very human politics playing out between elements and compounds at a time before the planets.

All of these techniques and narrative ideas combine to create something that feels both alien and soothingly familiar at the same time.

It reminded me of the worlds of Jak and Daxter or Myst with its flexible physics, cosmic concepts and vague time periods with objects from both the far-future and ancient past in co-existence.

While it deals in concepts that are totally alien to us, such as a time where the Milky Way was a fluid mass, its characters are oddly so familiar and real.

Their pain, wonder and desires are so relatable and the cosmic concepts and evolving galaxies around them are deftly used as metaphors to describe the changes and ups and downs in their lives.

I urge you to read this mind-expanding yet soothing book, I can already tell it’s one I will seek quiet solace in again and again.