Review: Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Posted: 19 Sep 2014, 22:48
Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities might be labelled a travelogue. It was, in fact, the traveller in me that first fell under its spell, though, the places Calvino describes don't exist on any map. Technically, this is a novel, a work of fiction, but one without any definite storyline. It consists of a sequence of imaginary dialogues between a young Venetian traveller Marco Polo and an aging Tartar emperor Kublai Khan, where neither of them understand one another's language at all, but come to understand each other through the colour of Polo's imagination. In the course of these discussions, the young Polo describes a series of metropolises he has seen journeying to the far reaches of Khan’s vast empire. Each short chapter describes a different city, 55 in all arranged in 11 groups.
"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his"; so begins Calvino's compilation of fragmented urban imageries. Polo tells the Khan about Hypatia, a city of beautiful blue lagoons but where "crabs were biting the eyes of the suicides, stones tied around their necks"; Armilla, which "has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be"; the spider-web city of Octavia, whose residents live suspended over an abyss, supported by a net they know won't last long; and other marvellous cities. It may be that he is creating them all out of his imagination, or perhaps he is recreating details of his native Venice over and over again, or perhaps he is simply recounting some of the countless possible forms a city might take.
At some point, you realize that Calvino is not talking about cities at all; not in the way we normally think of the word. His cities are constructed not of steel and concrete but of ideas. Each city represents a thought, an experiment, and an expression of some deeper sentiment or, as Polo tells Khan at one point, "You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders but in the answer it gives to a question of yours."
This is a slim book, but not the kind you devour in one sitting. I find myself pausing every two or three pages to process what I have just read, not because Calvino's writing is difficult to penetrate, but simply because the fact that he packs so much into each sentence; there is so much there. It is best, I think, to read Invisible Cities like a traveller - slowly, luxuriously, as if you have all the time in the world.
One of the cities described in the book ends with a warning, “You leave Tamara without having discovered it”; so it is with Invisible Cities. This is precisely what keeps drawing you back to this strange and wonderful book.
"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his"; so begins Calvino's compilation of fragmented urban imageries. Polo tells the Khan about Hypatia, a city of beautiful blue lagoons but where "crabs were biting the eyes of the suicides, stones tied around their necks"; Armilla, which "has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be"; the spider-web city of Octavia, whose residents live suspended over an abyss, supported by a net they know won't last long; and other marvellous cities. It may be that he is creating them all out of his imagination, or perhaps he is recreating details of his native Venice over and over again, or perhaps he is simply recounting some of the countless possible forms a city might take.
At some point, you realize that Calvino is not talking about cities at all; not in the way we normally think of the word. His cities are constructed not of steel and concrete but of ideas. Each city represents a thought, an experiment, and an expression of some deeper sentiment or, as Polo tells Khan at one point, "You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders but in the answer it gives to a question of yours."
This is a slim book, but not the kind you devour in one sitting. I find myself pausing every two or three pages to process what I have just read, not because Calvino's writing is difficult to penetrate, but simply because the fact that he packs so much into each sentence; there is so much there. It is best, I think, to read Invisible Cities like a traveller - slowly, luxuriously, as if you have all the time in the world.
One of the cities described in the book ends with a warning, “You leave Tamara without having discovered it”; so it is with Invisible Cities. This is precisely what keeps drawing you back to this strange and wonderful book.
