Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino)
Posted in Books on 05/12/2009 07:47 pm by Liz
“I think you recognize cities better on the atlas than when you visit them in person,” the emperor says to Marco, snapping the volume shut.
And Polo answers, “Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name.”
The copy of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities that I read says, inside the front cover, Set in a near-mythical past, pivoting inevitably on Venice, Invisible Cities is emphatically a book of our time, of your city. And that has a bit of truth to it. It’s about all cities, really, and I often felt as though it was about all times as well – or at least a great many. The book is a series of word-sketches of cities, framed within conversations between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo about the state of the Khan’s empire and about cities in a more general sense. It’s about imagination, reality, perceptions. And, of course, Venice.
It’s completely captivating, at least to me; little snippets that are individually intriguing build on themes, fit together to make something even more interesting. I’m somewhat in love with the language and ideas here.
As with a great many good books I read I feel almost reluctant to say too much about it; I feel as though it’ll be better if you discover it for yourselves, although that does rather defeat the point of a review. Nonetheless.
If you’d like something thoughtful and intriguing and more than a little strange, try this one. By the time I’d finished reading, I’d bookmarked every third page or so, just because it had something on it that interested me so much. I had trouble picking quotes because I wanted to quote entire chapters for you.
Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave.
“You can resume your flight whenever you like,” they said to me, “but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.”
