Title: Invinsible Cities
Author: Italo Calvino, with translator William Weaver
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Book description (taken from the back of my own copy):
In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo - Tartar emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts the emperor with tales of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: Cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. Soon it becomes clear that each of these fantastic places is really the same place.
“Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant” (Gore Vidal, New York Review of Books)
* * *
This book. How I wish I hadn't had finished it, because now it has come to an end and there will be no more. (Of course I could reread it again).
I'm forever grateful that I have discovered this gem. That I have read this book. I wish I could tell you - I wish I could describe it, and I wish I could elaborate what is it that has made me so warm when I read it passage by passage, when I was made stunned by the lyrical language that makes up the entire prose, a tale after a tale, each is so delicious and like no other that I wish I could read it as slowly as I could, in a vain attempt to make it everlasting.
Hidden messages. A portrayal of a city and its people, their happiness, sadness, foolishness, as well as grief, behaviors, desires, principles, pasts, memories, virtues, beliefs. A human being. A society. A community. A civilization. All are woven beautifully, almost like a drug, sedating and addictive, under the beautiful narration of Marco Polo the Italian merchant traveller, whose eyes have rejoiced in feast of the sight of the world and its cities. It is a fiction, not a biographical account indeed; yet the imaginary conversation between Marco Polo and the conqueror Kublai Khan could in fact turn out as real as it could be, regardless of everything.
During my childhood to adolescent years, I was the kind of girl who found simple happiness in conjuring up imaginary cities with its own traits and cultures and buildings, with a mix of fantasy: A quaint, charming little town in the riverside with potted flowers and wind chimes everywhere - and if someone took a stroll around the town square he could hear diverse chiming notes of melody in the air. Then I also imagined a village deep in the pine woods where the villagers - each family - lived inside a round, big tree trunk so wide in diameter (so their houses were actually built inside a tree) and each room was so thick with pine and earth and wilderness scents. There was also a city which spires and buildings and towers and walls were made of crystals that gleamed like pearls in the dusk, each shone in a different shade of color - brightened, glowed at a certain interval of time, like a pulse.
Perhaps it was because I played a lot of of RPG games. Most of them, usually, require you (the character) to travel in a quest from one village to the next, from one small town in a valley to a harbor town, from one big city on a rolling plateau to another big city in the middle of dessert. Even to the end of the world. I was so fascinated by these virtual villages/towns/cities that I could only see from the screen, and you won't believe me how the current me can easily reconstruct the very images of my favorite cities in games I played in the past so vividly.
(For example, Lindblum. And each of its district)
or Ritardando from Eternal Sonata
Which is one of the very basic reasons why I felt strongly compelled to pick up this book.
Marco Polo would tell you of a vibrant city with a multitude network of turquoise, sparkling canals and beautiful hanging bridges and balustrades. He would tell you of a city that builds an underground city just beneath the surface - which is occupied by the dead people of the city. He would also speak to you of a city that is built based on the blueprint of stars in the night sky and glimmering constellations.
Fret not, he won't tell you about that city's population or its statistics. He won't speak of its criminal rate.
Only that - as I've mentioned earlier - behind the images and its prosaic language, hidden messages and secrets are lurking, embossed with a thoughtful philosophy. An underlying conclusion. The visceral, inlaid meaning behind the obscured veil that, if you seek it out, it will be an unforgettable experience that is so personal and its effect is kind of long-lasting.
It's what beyond the surface. Which means, there's an element of illusory, contradictory, ambiguity, concealment, analogy, resemblance, surprise... but then again, each of them makes up for what you call reality, without any exclusion. Because they are part of reality. They are part of civilization. They are part of life.
I'm sorry if it is confusing, but I guess you should read it yourself.
But I'll give some example, taken from a number of passages of the book:
"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 the 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 among the bettors. He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.”
***
"The city appears to you as a while where no desire is lost and of which you are a part, and since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing but inhabit this desire and be content. Such is the power, sometimes called malignant, sometimes benign, that Anastasia, the treacherous city, possesses; if for eight hours a day you work as a cutter of agate, onyx, chrysoprase, your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave."
***
"In the center of Fedora, that gray stone metropolis, stands a metal building with a crystal globe in every room. Looking into each globe, you see a blue city, the model of a different Fedora. These are the forms the city could have taken if, for one reason or another, it had not become what we see today...
On the map of your empire, O Great Khan, there must be room both for the big, stone Fedora and the little Fedoras in glass globes. Not because they are equally real, but because all are only assumptions. The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer."
***
"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."
***
“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 take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours."
***
"Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have."
***
"Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invincible 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 at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence."
* * *
Again, I'm so grateful for having found this book. I never heard of Mr. Italo Calvino before, and I never heard people talk about him and his excellent works. At least most people, readers or bloggers, when talk about classics, would notably mention, for example, Austen, The Bronte sisters, Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, Dante Alighieri, Machiavelli, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Woolf, Proust, or Hemingway. I don't know why or how, I never encountered the name "Italo Calvino" before.
But I guess, it was only me. Because I hadn't specifically looked for a book that belongs to Italian Literature. Nonetheless, I encountered Mr. Calvino's name through a blogger who remembered that she'd read this book with pure thrill - something along the line - she described it, so shortly, in such a way that made me curious enough to look for it on
Goodreads.
My own thoughts, my own attempts to describe this book are probably, in the end, insufficient, unclear and incoherent. Or perhaps they lack of quality and do not even do justice. Or perhaps, too exaggerating. Having said that, I admit I'm still uncertain myself, as I'm not confident enough to define it.
It's just that, I feel deeply moved by this book.
And you see, there are various talented artists out there who have attempted to depict Calvino's Invisible Cities:
They are awesome, aren't they?
