Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (novel #204)

 (translated by William Weaver)

 

…seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space. ~ fictional dialogue, Marco Polo to Kublai Khan

 

Invisible Cities is an unusual novel. It is a frame story wherein Marco Polo describes the diverse cities of the Mongol empire in an audience with Kublai Khan. It is part fantasy, as all the cities are imaginary with chimerical qualities.

 

In Perinthia’s streets and square today you encounter cripples, dwarfs, hunchbacks, obese men, bearded women. But the worse cannot be seen; guttural howls are heard from cellars and lofts, where families hide children with three heads or with six legs.

 

It is part poetry as the description of each is sensual and romantic.

 

The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea.

 

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.

 

And I believe it is part commentary, perhaps on the invisible thread.

 

…there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.

 

The 55 cities each bear a woman’s name and are grouped into one of eleven themes:

Cities & Memory

Cities & Desire

Cities & Signs

Thin Cities

Trading Cities

Cities & Eyes

Cities & Names

Cities & the Dead

Cities & Sky

Continuous Cities

Hidden Cities

 

At various intervals, there is a dialogue between the Khan and the explorer. Kublai senses his realm is in decline and is anxious to learn what he can from another’s senses. He is both curious and incredulous of Marco’s descriptions.

 

“This is what I wanted to hear from you: confess what you are smuggling: moods, states of grace, elegies!”

 

and

 

“There is still one [one city] 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?”

 

It took a very silly turn when the two took a Turkish bath; the Khan blindfolded himself and then tried to locate Marco, by shouting “Marco,” to which Marco had to reply “Polo.”

 

Like my only other experience with Calvino, it is quite unconventional, but it didn’t captivate me the way If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler did. I suspect that Calvino’s message is philosophical and contemplative: mostly lost on me, though I admire his innovative approach and turn of phrase.

 

-- Just kidding about the Turkish bath, Marco Polo game :p --

 

 

My rating:  3.5 out of 5 stars

 

This novel satisfies "A Classic in Translation" [Italian to English] category in the Back to the Classics 2022 Challenge.

 

 Excerpt:

 

…I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the deck.

 

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