On May 9, 1962, Italo Calvino wrote to Umberto Eco that he wanted to draft a manifesto “for a cosmic literature.” At a certain point in his life, in the early 1960s, Calvino looked at science as he had never done before. To understand “our insertion into the world,” he feels the need to deal with the images that science produces and the language it employs in doing so. This will be a turning point for him.
Massimo Bucciantini’s book recounts the centrality of this passage. Through the use of numerous letters and archival documents, Bucciantini traces the origins of a program of imagination and writing that Calvino will categorize under the heading “thinking the universe” and that will accompany him until the end of his days; a project that will lead him into uncharted territories, toward a new way of doing literature. Not only will he have to learn how to “navigate intergalactic spaces” but, on the strength of his acquired insight, he will use it to try to understand how to live in this new world, radically rethinking the theme of the human condition.
A Copernican revolution, conducted in an attempt to find ways out of the stone world he sees closing in on him. To the entropy of the universe he will oppose the only tool he has at his disposal: his word factory, his idea of literature.