Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino and William Weaver

"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his." So begins Italo Calvino's compilation of fragmentary urban images. As Marco tells the khan about Armilla, which "has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be," the spider-web city of Octavia, and other marvelous burgs, it may be that he is creating them all out of his imagination, or perhaps he is recreating fine details of his native Venice over and over again, or perhaps he is simply recounting some of the myriad possible forms a city might take.

Strange, but I loved it. Definitely one to come back and reread later.

I started reading this a week or so ago. After reading the first page over and over and not processing it I thought: “I had better devote time to when I can actually work through what I am reading.” So I saved Invisible Cities for mornings when I was fresh and by myself. It was a nice way to start the day.

The language in Invisible Cities is just beautiful. I read a lot and have a fairly decent vocabulary and I found myself looking up words on my Kindle with almost every city Marco Polo “traveled” through.

This is the 87th book I've read for Mustich's 1000 books to read before you die and I can see why he included this one.

This book is more of a thought experiment than a story. It reminded me very strongly of the book Einstein's Dreams, by Alan Lightman, which is a thought experiment about time, whereas Calvino's is about cities. Between the two I strongly prefer the former, although it's hard to say why.

This is one of those books that's hard to summarize.

There's not much meat on the bones when it comes to story or characters. There's not much that changes or really pulls you in. For some readers, the idea of reading a page or two description of a strange, remote city will be enough to stoke their imaginations.

The book is Kublai Khan and Marco Polo in a conversation. Khan has tasked Polo with visiting his empire and reporting back his findings, even though he has an atlas with each city meticulously detailed via images already. Polo perhaps never leaves or goes to these places, instead tells tales of far away lands that may or may not exist. A good number of them have women's names.

That's it. There's no conflict, very little dialogue and only really the two characters. While short, this book took me a while to read. The first 50 or so pages flew by, then the rest crawled by. In a way, it reminded me of the first time I read Moby-Dick in college. That whole middle section about the whale? I skimmed and skipped my way through it to finish the book in time, knowing full well it had its purpose. For a lot of this book I found myself skimming, knowing I could always return to it later and perhaps will take more away from it when I'm in a mood to read meticulous descriptions of strange details.

Not to say the descriptions aren't great. A particular favorite of mine was the city suspended by a net, everything strung up and hanging, knowing eventually the net would break and the city would be gone.

There's a lot of artistry in this book, even if there isn't much story. There's a lot of metaphor to be gleaned from it as well. Khan, a conqueror who rules over a vast kingdom that he'll never get to see or know, to the point where Polo admits to most of his descriptions just being of his home city he misses dearly, or that he's making everything up to appease Khan. Still, Khan holds out hope. Polo is a captive who wishes to see these far off lands and can't, while Khan is a conqueror who supposedly has all of these things at his disposal but will never visit them.

There are times, especially in the chapters with women's names, where it seems abundantly clear it's very much about a woman. The woman he can't penetrate deeper into the heart of and only knows the exteriors of. Gee, wonder what that's about. There's also talk about death, from cities of the dead, cities with dualities or that are broken up into two, Khan and Polo muse if they're alive or dead and there's even a chess board that has irregularities that Polo is able to explain to a curious Khan.

Like I said, there's a lot to unpack in this dense little tome about the world, human nature, love and more, you just have to be in the right mood for it.