SOURCE: “Love and the Two Discourses in Le Cosmicomiche,” in Stanford Italian Review, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring, 1984, pp. 123–35.

In the following essay, Vlasopolos contrasts the role of love in Le Cosmicomiche.

In Le cosmicomiche Calvino constructs a universe overtly governed by the laws of thermodynamics, summaries of which introduce most of the stories; yet a closer look reveals that the motions of expansion and retraction, which serve as structural devices of plot, are in turn subject to one Prime Mover and First Agent, love. Love in Le cosmicomiche defines the essence of being without trapping it in a static form. The characters who love, from the dreamy lunatic of “La distanza della Luna” to the mollusk who first creates a shell in “La spirale,” experience the expansion and multiform transformation of matter of a universe full of greater possibilities. Those who refuse love, mistake it, or never encounter it...