Invisible Cities (1972)
Italo Calvino (1923-1985)
Translated from the Italian by William Weaver
165 pages
Cities have the ability to fire our imaginations. Certainly, as inhabitants, myriad aspirations for how we each wish to live motivate the layout and structure we give our cities. But, too, our minds eagerly conjure images of the remaining unfamiliar parts in our own hometowns, or of the manifold mysteries of a metropolis distant in time or location, based on how much or how little we might think we already know. In either case, the form these imagined cities take on in our minds – as lively, dark, inviting, chaotic – can indeed provide a window into our own particular attitudes, desires and preconceptions.
Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities turns on precisely this tendency of cityscapes to reveal the psychological and emotional needs not only of the people who build and inhabit them, but also of those who imagine how they might look and function. Calvino constructs his story around an imagined conversation between the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan and the Venetian trader Marco Polo, based on the historical fact of Marco having served for a time as Khan’s foreign emissary (LINKLINK polo wiki). Calvino has Marco returning from his travels throughout Southeast Asia and describing to the emperor some of the cities he has seen.
Khan soon comes to realize that the places Marco describes are not real, physical cities, but rather imagined ones. As Marco evokes the fantastical details of each city, Khan finds revealed in the often peculiar forms of their architectures and behaviors of their inhabitants, a window into human nature and its idiosyncrasies. He recognizes, too, that through these tales of fictional cities Marco is forcing him to confront his own desire to imagine a comforting, if non-existent, order to his sprawling and difficult-to-control empire.
Calvino gives a particular title to each tale of a city that Marco relates from his travels, such as “Cities and memory,” “Cities and names,” or “Thin cities,” among others, each such title pointing to a specific characteristic of the place that Marco evokes in his description. In a story labeled “Cities & Desire,” for example, we learn that:
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. In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe. (32)
Thus, Marco makes manifest the perpetual evolution of a city toward an ideal that, in the face of the often-conflicting desires its inhabitants, can never quite be achieved.
Through these sublimely intricate vignettes, Calvino provides readers poignant reminders of the profound connections between a city’s form – its structures and geography – and the lives of its inhabitants, as well as what our imagined reality of such places reveals about our own hopes and dreams.
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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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