Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

[This book was read forBookbugin January 2025]

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

— Charles Dickens, in, A Tale of Two Cities.

On the first Monday of the month of April, 1625, the market town of Meung, in which the author of Romance Of The Rose was born, appeared to be in as perfect a state of revolution as if the Huguenots had just made a second La Rochelle of it. Many citizens, seeing the women flying towards the High street, leaving their children crying at open doors, hastened to don the cuirass, and supporting their somewhat uncertain courage with a musket or a partisan, directed their steps toward the hostelry of the Jolly Miller, before which was gathered, increasing every minute, a compact group, vociferous and full of curiosity.

— Alexander Dumas, in, The Three Musketeers

Invisible Cities is a novel — if it can be called a novel at all — that is, at first glance, composed entirely of beginnings. Marco Polo, is a traveller visiting the court of Kublai Khan, to tell him tales of the cities he has seen on his many journeys across the occident, levant, and orient. Now, the Khan entertains a number of emissaries who visit him from across the empire to report on the empirical facts of its territories. Marco, however, tells different stories, structured almost like riddles, laced with philosophical ramblings that amuse and confound the Khan.

Calvino's text is based on the historical work of literature that was once called Le Livre de Merveilles in French — The Book of Marvels. We know of it today as The Travels of Marco Polo, and it was, incidentally, composed by a professional romance writer by the name of Rustichello de Pisa, rather than by Marco Polo himself. The story goes that Marco Polo met Rustichello in a prison in Genoa, and from their conversations, Rustichello collected enough material to compose The Travels.

Now, The Travels was written and published some time at the turn of the 14th Century; a time before the invention of movable type, which means that every copy and translation of the text was composed by hand in its own time, and this has sparked much debate between present day scholars about which of the surviving manuscripts constitutes the definitive text. Also contentious was the historicity of Marco Polo's descriptions of the world, but recent scholarship has shown that Marco Polo's account of his contemporary world was minute and accurate in its detail, without being completely exhaustive. Invisible Cities remains in conversation with The Travels throughout its narration — if it can be called narration.

Invisible Cities begins simply enough, with the framing device of Marco Polo at the courts of Kublai Khan, diving into a set of abstract descriptions of various cities, struck through by an enduring cord of misogyny and disgust for bodies that do not comply to some imaginary norm. This continues for eight cities until we come upon the city of Zirma, where we find,

[...] underground trains crammed with obese women suffering from the humidity.

This is quite an anachronism, for the first subway was inaugurated in London, 1863. This is where the reader is made aware of temporal dislocations within the text, where, until now only geographical dislocations were discernible. Temporal and spatial disjunction is at the very core of Invisible Cities, for it underscores the theory of the literary city that Calvino is attempting to compile. There is much meditation on the relations between words and the things they refer to, between the city as it is and the city as it was in the past, between living in a city and merely visiting — perhaps this is why every description resembles a beginning, Marco Polo is only visiting:

Travelling, you realise that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all other cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.

In between the views of cities, we see the language that Marco Polo and Kublai Khan develop between them to speak of the cities that Kublai Khan will never see. From these descriptions, the Khan begins to build his own imaginary cities, and in turn, questions the veracity of Marco's accounts.

All this weaves an interesting text, but not one that endears itself to this reader. To be sure, there are some cities that are extremely interesting, Eusapia for example, a city that is said to have built an underground necropolis in its own image. And through the passage of time, the relations between the city and its necropolis blur, and no one remembers whether the city built the necropolis, or the necropolis built the city. But this does not erase the fact that Calvino's text is a bit insipid, in that it overestimates the structural and philosophical thrust of its own text. The brevity of each description, and of the narrative frame, keeps the text from communicating any meaningful depth.

The author presumably hoped that the depth of his thought might be discerned by the reader in the minute relations between each city that populates the text. In this, Invisible Cities is a book that demands to be read and re-read, again and again, in order and out of order, in search of meaning, but that is asking a lot from the reader, perhaps too much, for the simplicity of the English translation by William Weaver does not quite inspire this. What it does inspire, however, is a great interest in reading The Travels, and therefore, all further comments on Invisible Cities shall be reserved until such time that this reader finishes Le Livre de Merveilles.