SOURCE: “Love and Annihilation in Calvino's Qfwfq Tales,” in Critique, Vol. 30, No. 1, Fall, 1988, pp. 59–68.

In the following essay, Gery surveys the major themes of Calvino's Qfwfq tales in Cosmicomics and t zero.

In “Without Colors,” one of the twelve stories in Italo's Calvino's Cosmicomics, Qfwfq, the narrator of the stories (as well as of the first seven stories in their companion volume t-zero), describes in great detail the transformation of the earth's surface from what was once a colorless, silent, dull, and rocky planet without air or water to its more recent form with its “pea-green lawns where the first scarlet poppies were flowering” and with “those canary-yellow fields which striped the tawny hills sloping down to the sea full of azure glints” (Cosmicomics 59–60). As is the case with all the Qfwfq tales, though, what is remarkable about “Without Colors” is that Qfwfq recounts this massive and slow...