Invisible Cities

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.

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.

Such a treat to read Calvino again! Especially interesting to read so closely after listening to Dan Carlin's podcast series on the Khans, although my newfound knowledge of the Mongol empire wasn't especially helpful for enjoying Calvino's quirkiness.

Invisible Cities seemed more melancholic than Calvino's other works (as I remember them) but was still lovely and delightful.

I don't know why this took me almost six months to read. It's 200 pages.

Very PoMo, no narrative to speak of. Beautiful prose. Mostly Marco Polo describing boatloads of cities to Kublai Khan. Individual cities' descriptions are quite short. A theme or themes do emerge, but as there's not a clear narrative thread, I didn't have a hook that made me want to pick it up and read more. I guess that's why it took six months. I don't read a lot of postmodern lit, so this might be a me problem.

I started to read this and immediately had to think about the video installation I saw a view days earlier from Fiona Tan called “Disorient” where a narrator reads excerpts from Marco Polos travel logs.

Then I read this and I was first surprised if this is like something similar, but no, this is different, this fascinating and this is a book after you read it once, you put it on your table and pick it up from time to time and then just read one chapter. And the more you read them, the more you will understand it.

This is a book with a capital B and one that doesn't stop giving.

‰ЫПThe wares, too, which the vendors display on their stalls are valuable not in themselves but as signs of other things ‰Ы_. Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПMarco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man‰ЫЄs place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. By now, from that real of hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else‰ЫЄs present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПI thought: ‰ЫчYou reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.‰ЫЄ‰Ыќ

Invisible Cities is an interesting experiment in world building and imagination. Calvino envisions many wonderous cities through the words of Marco Polo and it's interesting to picture yourself in these spaces-- to gleam the best of each city to include in your own life while rejecting what makes a city grim and glum.

The novel is overall brief, but written beautifully-- somewhere between poetry and prose. It's short length makes me believe it's a must read for everyone. Everyone will find something within its passages that resonates with them and makes them ponder.

I'm looking forward to reading more of his work, likely The Complete Cosmicomics next.

I wanted to like this book. It's short and stylistically unique. I very much enjoyed Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, and, after hearing about Invisible Cities at a writers' conference a few years back, I was excited to finally get to it. Generally, I wasn't very impressed. The premise wasn't thaaat interesting to me and the writing was just okay.

So different than anything else I have read, but also, very interesting. I feel as though it takes you on a journey at so many levels and touches on so many aspects of humanity even if it wasn't trying to. This seems like a book you could read many times and come away with different understandings each time and answers to questions you didn't know you wanted to ask.

You know those times when you agree with everyone because you don???t want to sound stupid?

This is amazing and meditative. For all of those writers out there, could be a really interesting writing exercise. I imagine you are regaling an even more self indulged) Elon Musk, who is perched on a throne lashed to the back of a cyber truck with your ideas for the rural rebuilding of Silicon Valley.

How many elevated fish tanks will the city have? Elon asked?
There will be enough to make this city statistically better than all others.