You: What is Invisible Cities?

[P]: A short Borgesian novel by Italo Calvino in which the traveller Marco Polo describes a series of [mostly fantastical] cities for the Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan.

You: What’s it all about?

[P]: I just told you.

You: No, you gave me a synopsis. What’s it really about? What was this Calvino guy trying to say?

[P]: Ah, shit.

You: You don’t know?

[P]: I’m not sure. It’s hard to explain. Marcel Proust once wrote, “the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

You: Is that relevant?

[P]: Yes, of course.

You: How so?

[P]: Ah, shit.

You: How many times have you read the book?

[P]: Twice

You: And you still can’t say anything meaningful about it?

[P]: Well, one man’s meaningful is another man’s rambling incoherent bullshit. I’m wary of rambling.

You: It has never worried you before.

[P]: That’s a good point.

You: So proceed.

[P]: Well, the reader is told in one of the linking narrative sections that the two men don’t speak the same language, that they actually communicate via signs and objects. One imagines that as a consequence of speaking different languages, and the subsequent miscommunication between them, that both have a different conception/understanding of the cities being ‘described.’ The cities of Kublai Khan’s mind, then, could be the invisible [non-existent] cities of the title, as he, unlike Polo, has never seen them but only ‘heard’ of them from someone else.

Yet while this idea of an elaborate Chinese whispers appeals to me, I am not certain that there is enough evidence to support a claim that it was Calvino’s intention to explore it. Indeed, that something, like a city, can exist in two different forms in the imaginations of two different men, that it can change in appearance as it passes from the mind of one person to the mind of another, throws up interesting questions about the nature and reliability of knowledge, and also, if one ignores for a moment the claim that the two men are communicating via signs etc, touches on the merits and otherwise of oral storytelling. Yet, it is Polo’s descriptions that are fantastical, we are not privy to Kublai’s interpretations. To give weight to the idea that this is really a book about communication, about building images in one’s mind, there would need to be some sense that Polo’s descriptions are at odds with his listener’s understanding of what he is told, and there isn’t.

You: So you’ve told me what you don’t think the book is about?

[P]: Yes.

You: Are you always like this?

[P]: No, but…

You: If someone asks you for directions to the supermarket do you tell them how to get to the library?

[P]: No, but Invisible Cities suggests many interpretations.

You: Does it? On the reverse of the novel itself there is a quote by Paul Bailey who claims that it is a paean to Venice, that the descriptions of seemingly distinct places are actually descriptions of that one city.

[P]: I’m aware of that. But doesn’t that indicate that knowledge of Venice would be necessary in order to understand or fully appreciate Calvino’s work?.

You: I guess so.

[P]: I just don’t quite buy that, as it seems extraordinarily cheeky of a writer to expect his readership to hop on a plane to Italy in order to be able to make sense of his book.

You: You’re not much of a traveller, then?

[P]: I…well…the thing is, whenever I go anywhere I find that the place was more romantic, more beautiful, more special in my mind, in anticipation, than it is in reality. I am always disappointed whenever I go anywhere.

You: Life must be a real bitch for you.

[P]: Yes, but I think that might be what Calvino was getting at. My favourite interpretation of Invisible Cities would be that Kublai Khan knows that Polo is not telling the truth when he recounts his tales of marvellous places, but prefers these wonderful imaginative cities to the actual cities over which he rules, that like Don Quixote this magical world is more appealing to him than the real thing.

You: So there you are, you do know what the book is about.

[P]: No. Because I am not totally convinced of this interpretation either. Indeed, the thought that struck me with the most vehemence whilst reading it was that this is a novel about understanding the essence of cities, rather than their purely physical appearance. I wrote something about myself…

You: Ah, shit.

[P]: Is that objectionable to you?

You: [Sighing deeply] No, no. Go on then, what did you write…[almost indistinctly} about yourself?

[P]: I wrote…

To understand my home city I have to understand another, to see it I have to see another, for it is that other city that gives this one, my home, existence; it is that other city that brought me here, that made here possible. That other city is London. When I try to see London, I see:

A photobooth in Paddington station, that might not exist anymore, that might never have existed in Paddington station, for maybe it was in Marylebone station. Or Kings Cross. But for me it is there in Paddington station, forever.

A girl in a red coat, fairytale-like, emerging out of the crowd on Camden High Street; opposite, across the road, is a megastore, the name of which is obscured; behind me is Camden tube station.

The girl: Jemmia, two weeks before she tried to kill herself for the first time. Or three weeks. Or maybe even four. And who is to say her coat was red? And yet I see it with the same kind of certainty and assurance as if the image of her in it is tattooed on my arm.

My London is an imaginary London, it exists only within me. I trace it not with my feet or my hands or my eyes, but ghost-like through my memories. And yet this dream of London has a pull and an influence on me stronger than the four walls that will keep me tonight or the street I’ll tread tomorrow.

It is times like this that you start to realise that your whole life is a dream, an unmanageable and complex web of dreams and imaginings.

You: Y'know, that’s not half as bad as I feared.

[P]: Thanks, I guess.

You: But still you’re mostly just stalling for time.

[P]: Maybe. Thing is, we could do this forever and I will still probably be unable to adequately describe, sum up, or understand Invisible Cities. In fact, it occurs to me now all I have done is to essentially outline a series of Invisible Novels. At the very least, I hope one of them inspires you to read to Calvino’s.

You: I’ll get back to you on that.

n  "It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear."n

Kublaj Kan, car u sopstvenom, nepoznatom carstvu, stanovnik svih gradova; Marko Polo, trgovac u tudjem carstvu, stanovnik jednog jedinog grada - Venecije; Pisac koji spaja dva sveta, dva junaka koji možda i nisu zaista tu; i pedeset i pet gradova izmedju: zapisa uspomena, razmišljanja i osećanja, gradovi u svetu i svetovi u gradu, gradovi kao nove knjige, ali i one stare, pročitane. Pedeset i pet vinjeta napisanih rukom pesnika, jer Kalvino je beskonačno poetičan i ništa manje inteligentan u svojim opisima, i knjiga od sto pedeset stranica, a biblijskih razmera. Idealna za pusto ostrvo, jer može da se čita iznova i iznova i iznova i da uvek bude novi prijatelj, stari poznanik.

5+

After sunset, on the terraces of the palace, Marco Polo expounded to the sovereign the results of his missions. As a rule the Great Khan concluded his day savoring these tales with half-closed eyes until his first yawn was the signal for the suite of pages to light the flames that guided the monarch to the Pavilion of August Slumber.
But this time Kublai seemed unwilling to give in to the weariness.
"Tell me another city!" he insisted.

With Marco Polo cast in the role of Scheherezade and Kublai Khan as Harun Al Rashid, we embark on an enchanted journey through 1001 cities, seeking to capture their unique essence, their secret identity, their pasts and their futures. The great khan is approaching the end of a glorious career, his wars of conquest finished and his dominion extending to the outer margins of the known world. Now he turns his attention inward in an effort to discover what exactly is his empire composed of. For this purpose, he sends his ambassador Marco Polo to all the corners of the realm, to see and to report back on the geography, the arhitecture, the people, the customs and the history of all the cities he passes through. Based on these stories, Kublai Khan dreams of building the perfect city, the sublimation of all the diversity into a sparkling, diamond like structure that would endure for all ages and will form his legacy for future generations.
Marco Polo is in his element here, the born explorer who follows his own siren song to find out what lies beyond the horizon, what precious treasure are hidden behind high city walls, still chasing the dream that sent him away for long years from his beloved Venice.

Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.

Why call them invisible since we spend the whole book discussing the visible? Because Italo Calvino entices us to look beyond appearances, beyond the obvious and the trivial if we want to find the secret that makes each city unique and unforgetable. Each of the visited cities is named with a woman's name, a poet's trick that suggests odalisques dancing seductively behind seven diaphanous veils, needing to be caught by surprise, teased or charmed into finally revealing their inner beauty.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

Are the cities described in the book real or fantastic? A figment of Marco Polo's imagination that he feeds piecemeal to Kublai Khan as payment for his sojourn at the court? Or are they actual locations that can still be discovered today by the adventure bound tourist? Readers who are already familiar with Italo Calvino know that the poet loves dissimulation of his purposes, puzzles and daring metaphors, so they would patiently wait for the last veil to be lifted, for the final revelation to be brought to light, for the name of the ultimate city to be uttered.
Until then, the casual reader can only relax and enjoy the apparently random postcard like prose poems that link stone with emotion, people with stars, the dead with the living. The atlas of the world that is patiently gathered in these pages is etched with sugestive names, symbolic gestures, sights, smells, songs, desires, dreams, memories, cautionary warnings, "moods, states of grace, elegies"

When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls between the bettors.

Cities as bastions against wilderness, civilization versus barbarism, art versus plain existence, the eternal versus the transient, structure and order versus chaos - each and every postcard contains within itself dualities of meaning where every affirmation is countered by a negation, every highlight serves to point at the shadows : the city of the dead reflecting the map of the city above, the city on the ground mirroring the dance of the constellations in the night sky.

What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howl of the wolves?

Read on to learn how one city is like a "butterfly emerging from a beggared chrysalis", another is growing in concentric circles like tree trunks which each year add one more ring, how the city where you arrive for the first time is different from the one you leave never to return, even if they bear the same name. Yet another city is described like a game of chess, or compared to an hourglass which is not turned over, with the unborn citizens waiting patiently their turn in the upper bulb, while the dead are settling at the bottom like geological strata. One city would inspire opposite phantasmes in the eye of the beholder: one sailor gazes upon its's domes and sees camel caravans setting off, while the bedouin glimpses tall white towers like sails departing for far off lands.

Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes; and so the camel driver and the sailor see Despina, a border city between two deserts.

Calvino is not interested in the cold data of statistics and economic trends, angle of arcades or width of boulevards, dates of revolutions or names of famous leaders. He is after the effect of the city on the psyche of its inhabitants, the subjective translation of desire into the language of stone.

A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira's past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

You might be tempted to think that Marco Polo is only spinning tales of long abandoned cities from the past, but I would argue against the theory. Even when talking about histories and ruins and the march of generations, the message is both timeless and timely. The same words would describe any of the cities we are living in today. I found clear references to globalization, corporate monoculture, suburban sprawls, alienation, consumerism and many other woes of the 21st century. Read for yourself and see if you recognize the landscape:

In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another: meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping.

Ultimately, every city described in the novel is indeed just another faucet of that gemstone Kublai was wishing for - the eternal, universal, 'invisible' heart of the word 'city' as a simbol of civilization.  Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice. exclaims at one point Marco Polo. This civilization he sees as heading for dissolution, just like the short-lived empire of Kublai Khan, attacked not so much from without as from its own internal weaknesses, a failure of imagination that favors conformity and safety over change and diversity.

Yes, the empire is sick, and, what is worse, it is trying to become accustomed to its sores. This is the aim of my explorations: examining the traces of happiness still to be glimpsed, I gauge its short supply. If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.

I will put my conclusion in spoiler tags, because it is too beautiful and elegant to be left out, but also too relevant as the solution to the puzzle to be revealed in advance.
In a final dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, they dwell on the subject of fictional cities in literature, utopian and dystopian, and on the unavoidable death and destruction waiting for them at the end of the road.
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

This is a sort of homage to Marco Polo’s travelogue and consists of Polo describing 55 different cities to Kublai Khan, each city having a woman’s name. It is divided into nine chapters. Each chapter is started and finished with a brief conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. The cities are split into eleven groups of five and each group has a particular theme. There is a particular mathematical structure which has been tabulated and is freely available on the internet if you are so inclined. This isn’t really surprising as Calvino was a member of the Oulipo group. It is also true that as Polo says, all the descriptions of the various cities are really aspects of his own city, Venice. The writing is certainly poetic and beautiful and it is easy to read. It has also had acres of praise from other authors and critics.
Here is Gore Vidal:
“Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvellous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.”
Jeanette Winterson:
“The book I would chose as pillow and plate, alone on a desert island.”
Minna Proctor:
“Calvino’s fiction isn’t a story; it’s an ordering and reordering of the emotional and philosophical reverberations of our civilized world, our human condition”
Here is Calvino himself:
“For example, when I began writing Invisible Cities I had only a vague idea of what the frame, the architecture of the book would be. But then, little by little, the design became so important that it carried the entire book; it became the plot of a book that had no plot.”
Yes that’s right, there is no plot, there is structure and framework. It has also been turned into an opera …. And a ballet.
Calvino does pull together fragments and comments that have resonance and provoke thought:
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space”
“…the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping… something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene.”
The cities are not all medieval as although this is a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, Calvino is not limited by time and space and his comment that “all of the world’s airports are really the same” may resonate with many. This is a travel book without the travel as the conversations indicate.
Inevitably a whole industry of study and analysis has grown around the novel: discussions of Calvino’s notions of nonchronological temporality, applications of Deleuze’s temporal theory to provide a systematic analysis of Calvino’s radical notion of time and I’m not even going to mention synthesizing “the repetition of instants”.
I enjoyed the language and the poetic flow of it all, but like some other “classics” I had some misgivings. All the cities are set in the East and they have their fair share of camels, goats, bearded women, naked women of great beauty and various “sideshow” type predictabilities, all named after women and all available for the male gaze, inert. I also had Said’s Orientalism running through my head as well.
So, I finished it with some hesitations in my mind, but I’m glad I read it.

Κάπου διάβασα νομίζω ότι δεν εχει υπάρξει πλήρης ανάλυση του συμβολισμου όλων αυτών των πόλεων για τις οποίες μας μιλά ο συγγραφέας. Όσο το σκέφτομαι, τόσο καταλαβαίνω το γιατί.
Κάθε ιστορία μπορεί να σημαίνει χίλια πράγματα για τον καθένα και ακόμα το νόημα που της έδωσες σήμερα, αν την ξαναδιαβάσεις σε 2 χρόνια να της δώσεις κάποιο άλλο.
Αυτή ουσιαστικά είναι και η μαγεία του βιβλίου. Οι πολείς είναι ο καθρέφτης μας. Μπορεί να μην μας αρέσει πάντα ή να μην τις κατανοούμε απόλυτα αλλά έτσι είναι η ζωή.
Μια δεύτερη ανάγνωση επιβάλλεται.

Pošto ne može 10, onda samo 5 zvezdica.

Un caleidoscopio di immagini mentali, di riflessioni filosofiche, di affreschi e di fotografie. Calvino è in grado di rendere magiche anche le cose più terrene. C'è qualcosa di inafferrabile all'interno di questo libro e lo rileggerò altre mille volte cercando disperatamente di cogliere tutto ciò che posso.

Enter quote: The book’s final paragraph.

An entirely objective review of this novel might not be quite feasible, since n  Invisible Citiesn proved quite visibly to be my exact, total and absolute cup of tea.

Written in the 70s, this new addition to my ‘favourites’ shelf here on Goodreads received a Nebula Award for Best Novel nomination in 1975. Meandering flawlessly among philosophy, allegory, fantasy and magical realism, n  Invisible Citiesn build luminous images and arguments on a wide range of themes, like memory, desire or death.

Read more on my n  n    websiten  n.

n  "What are men to rocks and mountains?"n - Jane Austen
Or should I say, "What are men to cities and structures?"

I finish Invisible Cities as my parents plan their trip to Europe. As someone who loves going to new places and travelling, there is a sense of irony that I feel as I review this. As a 21 year old student with neither the money nor the means to embark on a journey myself, I find myself wandering about the cities that Marco Polo describes to the great Kublai Khan.

Invisible Cities is a fairy tale; albeit a fairy tale for adults. Calvino, who was surely high as a kite when he wrote this, describes in this tiny, yet profoundly powerful book, eleven kinds of "cities". Cities, they maybe, but they are the cities that we imagine. These are fantastical cities we lose ourselves in all day, everyday. These cities are not cities at all; they are the thoughts we think, the stories we imagine, and the people we think we perceive. Invisible Cities is an ethereal masterpiece that transports us to a world that we would like to see ourselves in, but would perhaps be disappointed to set foot in. It is that single moment of thought right before reality and dreams morph into one another. After all, n  the descriptions of cities Marco Polo visited had this virtue: you could wander through them in thought, become lost, stop and enjoy the cool air, or run off.n

To the people who say that all these cities sound the same, I give you the Great Khan's reasoning: n  "Kublai Khan had noticed that Marco Polo's cities resembled one another, as if the passage from one to another involved not a journey but a change of elements. Now, from each city Marco described to him, the Great Khan's mind set out on its own, and after dismantling the city piece by piece, he reconstructed it in other ways, substituting components, shifting them, inverting them.:n

I don't think I can do justice to the masterpiece that is Invisible Cities by writing about it myself; I am unworthy. I have, instead collected quotes by some of the world's best writers, quotes that sum up what each of these cities were to me.

Memory
n  "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."n - George Orwell

Desire
n  "The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.n - Willa Cather

Signs
n  "Signs may be but the sympathies of nature with man."n - Charlotte Bronte

Thin Cities
n  "Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go."n - Rebecca Solnit

Trading Cities
n  "Where there is commerce there is peace."n - Jeffrey Tucker

Eyes
n  "The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter - in the eye."n - Charlotte Bronte

Names
n  "We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society."n - Alan W. Watts

Dead
n  "The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living.n - Marcus Tullius Cicero

Sky
n  "The sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet."n - Jandy Nelson

Continuous Cities
n  "You can checkout anytime you like, but you can never leave."n - The Eagles

Hidden Cities
n  "If you stay here, you become lost. And no one can find you. I like lost."n - Ally Kondie

At the aftermath of my surreal reading experience, I realised that every city is one of memory and of desire, of signs and of eyes. Every city is a thin city, every city is a trading city. Every city belongs to the dead; every city rules the skies, and every city is hidden. Every city is defined by its name, and every city is continuous. Every city is all of these cities; it is what we make it to be, it is how we perceive it. Like Venice. n  ""There is still one of which you never speak."
Marco Polo bowed his head.
"Venice," the Khan said.
Marco smiled. "What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?"
The emperor did not turn a hair. "And yet I have never heard you mention that name."
And Polo said: "Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice."
"When I ask you about other cities, I want to hear about them. And about Venice, when I ask you about Venice."
"To distinguish the other cities' qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit. For me it is Venice."n

n  "It has neither name nor place. I shall repeat the reason why I was describing it to you: from the number of imaginable cities we must exclude those whose elements are assembled without a connecting thread, an inner rule, a perspective, a discourse. With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else."n

n  Invisible Cities; Imagined Livesn

Marco Polo was a dreamer. He had great ambitions - wanting to be a traveller, a writer and a favored courtier. He wanted to live in the lap of luxury in his lifetime and in the best illustrated pages of history later. But he could only be a dreamer and never much more. Was it good enough? He never travelled anywhere and spent his life dreaming away in his Venice and is remembered to this day as the greatest explorer and travel writer of all time. How did that come about? It is a tale about the triumph of imagination over experience.

In Venice, that city of water, a network of canals and a network of streets span and intersect each other. Marco Polo was traveling in a little boat in that Venice and thinking of the Marco Polo he was meant to be when his imagination began to soar. All the travelogues he wanted to write started coming to his mind. A whole book of descriptions, all made of poems that would describe the beauty of this city like those waves reflecting it in varied shapes among their ripples. He watched the people moving along the streets, each eye seeing the same city differently, dependent on the angle of observation, and speaking in a language of symbols and images that is more powerful than words can ever be. The river is the story, the river is the book, arranged in perfect sinusoidal waves of its own and choosing as its reader the greatest of all appreciators, the book catches the splendor of the city and reflects it for your patient eyes in a sort of primitive cubism, leaving it to you to make out all its meaning and all its poetry and to see ultimately yourself in that reflection of all the cities that imagination could possibly build.

He started going on long voyages into his own mind, into the reflections of Venice, and into the reflections of those reflections. And then he wrote them down and he spoke of them and he sang of them. Men stopped to listen. They paid to hear him, first with time, then with gold, then with diamonds and great honors.

The Venetian was soon summoned to the court of the great Kublai Khan, who was also a dreamer. He envisioned himself to be the greatest of rulers, his kingdom expanding and pouring over the whole vast world until all the world was under him. He knew that information was power and he wanted to know of every single city under him, and of every city that was to be under him. ‘On the day when I know all the cities,’ he thought, 'I shall be able to possess my empire, at last!’ He wanted Marco polo to be his eyes and ears and sent him off, with instructions to visit the most far flung and exotic provinces and to understand the soul of every city and to report back to him.

Marco Polo bowed every time and with great aplomb set off for his great voyages. Next week he would be in his beloved Venice, dreaming up the world, a world more real than reality, with all the ingredients needed to construct a city - memories, desires, signs, skies, trade, eyes, sounds, shapes, names and the dead. He spoke of old cities with gods and demons in it, of cities yet to be, with airplanes and atomic bombs coloring their movements, and of cities that should have been, with happiness and sorrow apportioned in balance. What separates the dream’s reality from the dreamer’s reality? He pondered on this mystery with every city. Maybe all successful men dream our lives as it should be while rotting in some sewer and maybe all unhappy men dream their unhappiness in life while rotting in some palace? Maybe we can only continue our chosen destinies and everything else is a dream. It is only invisible cities we can construct. And we can reflect on them only through imagination, and fiction. He knew his cities were real.

It took many years for the Great Khan to realize that Marco Polo wasn't describing cities so much as the human mind and experience. He realized that every city, whether imagined by Marco Polo or constructed by planned blueprints or grown from slow accretion are all dreams given shape by human hands, by human ambition, by a desire for a future that can be shaped. In fact, Marco Polo’s cities started to seem to him more real than any he knew to be real. He learned that if men and women began to live their ephemeral dreams, every phantom would become a city in which to begin a story of pursuits, pretenses, misunderstandings, clashes, oppressions, and the carousel of fantasies would stop.

Khan now knew how to travel, to really travel. He could now accompany the great explorer in his prophetic journeys. He could describe cities to Marco Polo and he could listen to him, even as he filled in the details. They could sit together in the courtyard and be silent and still travel through the most exotic and most truthful of cities.

Then came a day when Marco Polo had to inform the Khan, ‘Sire, now I have told you about all the cities I know.'

'There is still one of which you never speak.'

Marco Polo bowed his head.

'Venice,' the Khan said.

Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?'

The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.'

And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.'

'When I ask you about other cities, I want to hear about them. And about Venice, when I ask you about Venice.' Khan made an attempt at looking angry but he knew his friend could see through faces and all such masks.

'To distinguish the other cities' qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit. For me it is Venice. For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Venice under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Venice.’

'You should then describe for me Venice - as it is, all of it, not omitting anything you remember of it.'

'Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,' Polo said. 'Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.’

Kublai looked at Polo. He understood. To tell a story you have to start from what you know best. You have to put your soul in the story and then build the flesh, the hair, the face and the clothes around it. The more stories you tell, the more of your soul you invest and lay bare to the world. When do you start fearing that you are as invisible as the cities you create? Kublai continued to look sadly at his friend.

Kublai asks Marco, 'When you return to the West, will you repeat to your people the same tales you tell me?'

'I speak and speak,' Marco says, 'but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.'

Then Khan knew that the sadness he felt so pressingly as he tried to force the wine down was not for his dear friend but for himself, he now knew that as he was listening to all the stories that Marco Polo was describing to him, he was only hearing stories that he was telling himself. The cities were all real, but they were not reflections of Marco Polo’s soul, they were not reflecting his Venice. They were reflecting Kublai Khan’s own soul, his own empire, ambitions, desires and fears.


Disclaimer: Marco Polo Really Did Go To China, Maybe


Edit: I got a message from a goodreader asking me why I put up the whole story of the book without a spoiler warning...

Please go ahead and read the review without any fear of spoilers, the connection with the plot of the book (if any) is very tenuous - this is an imagined plot/backstory for a book that deliberately lacks one.

Italian author extraordinaire - Italo Calvino, 1923-1985

Invisible Cities - a Calvino novel to luxuriate in, to frolic in, to set your imagination on fire. So many fine reviews of this classic have appeared over the years by writers such as Joseph McElroy (1974 New York Times review, the year the novel appeared in English) and John Updike who observed,“Calvino was a genial as well as brilliant writer. He took fiction into new places where it had never been before, and back into the fabulous and ancient sources of narrative.”

So, rather than formulating my own review using a conventional format, here are ten questions we can ask ourselves while journeying with Calvino -

1. What are we to make of Calvino using two historical figures from the medieval period – Kublai Khan and Marco Polo – to frame his novel?

2. Is Calvino engaging in a bit of postmodern fun when he has Marco Polo include such things as refrigerators and airports in his descriptions of cities?

3. In what ways do cities, otherwise invisible, become visible to us through fiction?

4. What are the substantial differences between our memories of having visited a real city and having visited the cities in Calvino's Invisible Cities or other cities in other works of fiction? If we read in a state of heightened awareness, an awareness much keener than walking around a brick and mortar city half asleep, wouldn't this imagined city be more real for us?

5. Marco Polo describes fifty-five cities, all the cities bearing the name of a woman. What are the links between cities and the feminine?

6. At one point, Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan in his description of all of these cities, in a certain way, he is also describing Venice. How would you explain this?

7. Italo Calvino himself stated directed that Invisible Cities has no direct end, because "this book was made as a polyhedron, and it has conclusions everywhere, written along all of its edges." What do you make of the author's statement?

8. The structure of the novel can be seen to contain a good bit of mathematics (check out the Wiki entry on Invisible Cities with references to semiotics and structuralism). What connection to mathematics can you detect?

9. The fifty-five cities are divided into 11 groups as per below. What are the common qualities within each of the 11 groups? What is the significance of Calvino having 5 iterations of each of the 11 and how does each group relate to the others?

1. Cities & Memory
2. Cities & Desire
3. Cities & Signs
4. Thin Cities
5. Trading Cities
6. Cities & Eyes
7. Cities & Names
8. Cities & the Dead
9. Cities & the Sky
10. Continuous Cities
11. Hidden Cities

10. Which cities fire your own imagination the most and can you think of any other novel where imagination plays a more decisive role? I can't!

For me, the cities that have resonated the deepest are Calvino's Thin Cities. Here they are, each with a Calvino quote along with my comment.

ISAURA
This is the city of the thousand wells since it rises, or so it's said, over a deep, subterranean lake. "On all sides, wherever the inhabitants dig long vertical holes in the ground, they succeed in drawing up water, as far as the city extends, and no father." With all the water, Isaura does indeed remind one of Venice.



ZENOBIA
"But what is certain is that if you ask an inhabitant of Zenobia to describe his vision of a happy city, it is always a city like Zenobia that he imagines." I can imagine denizens of a number of cities thinking their city the best, the one city they are more than happy to live it, cities like Amsterdam, Paris, Tokyo, San Francisco - and Venice. Oh, I forgot to mention my own city of Philadelphia!



ARMILLA
This is the city that's all exposed plumbing, an entire city of pipes running vertically and horizontally. "At any hour, raising your eyes among the pipes, you are likely to glimpse a young woman, or many your women, slender, not tall of stature, luxuriating in the bathtubs or arching their backs under the showers suspended in the void, washing or drying or perfuming themselves, or combing their long hair at a mirror." Oh, baby, as a typical guy, I'd like to make a beeline to Armilla.



SOPHRONIA
Here we have two half-cities pressed together - one half, a substantial city made with much stone, a city like Edinburgh, and the other half an amusement part/circus complete with roller coaster, Ferris wheels and big top tent. "One of the half-cities is permanent, the other temporary, and when the period of its sojourn is over, they uproot it, dismantle it, and take it off, transplanting it to the vacant lots of another half-city." Then the surprise: the Edinburgh-like half is the one that's temporary.


OCTAVIA
This is the spider-web city. "There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks." Any takers for a guided tour? By my modest judgement, one of the more unique of Marco Polo's (and also Calvino's) cities.


*Note: A special thanks to David Bordelon and the Ocean County College Globetrotters. I learned so much during our Zoom book discussion of this Calvino classic.

I think I haven’t clashed so violently with goodreaders’ opinion since reading Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, but I can’t trick myself into liking this book when I didn’t care for it at all. It is beautiful, poetic, dreamlike, subtle, clever; yes. I can see it materialized as a sculpture, a painting or even turned into a sonata. It’s the kind of book that has the potential of making you feel like you're floating in the sea on a pleasant summer evening. But for me it was more like being thrown into the water and struggling not to drown. The descriptions didn’t hold my interest even though unicorns are mentioned at one point. All this beauty bored me. I had trouble with the form (plainly put, it’s basically Marco Polo describing a bunch of imagined cities), which made it difficult to appreciate the layers underneath. Despite its clear objective merits, I didn’t enjoy Invisible Cities at all and I can’t brush aside the fact that I spent every page willing Marco Polo to shut the fuck up.