Reading the World discussion

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities might be labeled travelogue. It was, in fact, the traveler in me that first fell under its spell. The places Calvino describes, though, don't exist on any map. Technically, this is a novel, a work of fiction, but one without any storyline. The only characters are an aging Kublai Khan and a young-ish Marco Polo. They're sitting in a garden, where the Venetian explorer is regaling the Mongol ruler with tales of the cities he has seen journeying to the far reaches of Khan's vast empire. Each short chapter describes a different city, 55 in all.

These are fantastical, beguiling places, where things are never as they seem. There's Hypatia, a city of beautiful blue lagoons but where "crabs were biting the eyes of the suicides, stones tied around their necks"; Laudomia, the city of the unborn, whose inhabitants have constructed a parallel city for those yet to come; Octavia, the spider-web city, whose residents live suspended over an abyss, supported by a net they know won't last long; and Argia, a city with earth instead of air.

At some point, you realize that Calvino is not talking about cities at all, not in the way we normally think of the word. Calvino's cities — like all cities, really — are constructed not of steel and concrete but of ideas. Each city represents a thought experiment, 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."

https://www.npr.org/2013/01/21/161712...

I have started the book today and am enraptured. Its like reading poetry. These 55 cities of Calvino's imagination. A make believe world that makes you believe. And this is after reading 4 pages!!

Invisible Cities is what has been described as metafiction, in that there is no overriding plot line, no true character development and the form of the writing becomes the essence of the book. I at first thought this 165 page book would be very quick reading but it actually took me a long time to slowly move through the two main streams of investigations. The first stream is the conversation between Kublai Khan and his employee, the merchant Marco Polo. Kublai, the Great Khan consolidated Genghis Khan's, his grandfather's Mongol Empire and set up a new capital in what is now Beijing, founding the Yuan Dynasty of China. His dominion is so vast, endless and unknowable that he has asked Marco to describe to him the cities that Marco has encountered in his travels, as Kublai can never hope to see to the ends of his empire. The conversation between the Great Khan and Marco Polo takes many forms from arranging objects that represent cities, playing guessing games about cities that may or may not mirror the imagination, playing chess to see the form of an empire by peeling away the endless descriptive words, and even simply being quiet with each other wondering if the cities really exist or if they exist only in their imaginations.
The second stream in the book is Marco's layered and eloquent descriptions of cities, from Valdrada, the city that reflects itself in a lake and needs its reflection to exist, to Beersheba that floats in the sky and a whole collection of everything in-between. The cities are all variants of what a traveler from Venice may feel about a city and Marco Polo even admits to The Great Khan that although he has not mentioned Venice, all the cities he talks about are variants on Venice, the almost miraculous city drowning in the lagoon. The prose which is so rich, carries a hint of nostalgia that slowly transitions to something closer to despair as the cities become overcrowded, full of dirt, or simply a limbo of endless outskirts, a worldview where the cities all look the same except the airport names change.
Calvino's ability to speak to what a person sees, remembers, forecasts, envisions, names and feels about a city are all there in this remarkable book.

Finished the book. I savored every word, every page. I was not flipping forward, trying to figure out how the book would end.
A nice break from the plot laden books I have been reading lately.