Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972) is a book teeming with paradoxes: it is prose, but feels like poetry; it is very erudite, you feel the author has swallowed a whole library, and you can hear echoes of other works, yet it possesses an astonishing lightness; it is repetitive, yet it feels strangely fresh, indeed so dangerously alluring that you want to read it very slowly, in order not to finish it too quickly, not to overdose, as it is like a drug.
It is impossible to summarise it: in order to give the potential reader an idea about the book, one should quote a passage, yet it seems that no fragment can represent the whole (nevertheless, we must quote a passage anyway):
“When the camel driver sees, at the horizon of the tableland, the pinnacles of the skyscrapers come into view, the radar antennae, the white and red wind-socks flapping, the chimneys belching smoke, he thinks of a ship; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off, with the breeze already swelling the sails, not yet unfurled, or a steamboat with its boiler vibrating in the iron keel; and he thinks of all the ports, the foreign merchandise the cranes unload on the docks, the taverns where crews of different flags break bottles over one another’s heads, the lighted, ground-floor windows, each with a woman combing her hair.”
A meeting, real or imaginary
Literally, the book tells the story of the meeting between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan during which Polo describes to the curious Khan the cities that he had seen during his voyages. The two did really meet (in Beijing, in 1266), but the reader quickly realises that historical facts are just a pretext for Calvino’s story. The narrator and the listener are not flesh-and-blood men; they are nebulous, elusive. But perhaps what really counts is the reader, the real addressee of the stories. As Calvino puts it: “It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear”.
The meeting, and the telling of the stories, bring to mind The Arabian Nights, and the name of Kublai Khan evokes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan (which carries the subtitle “Or, a vision in a dream. A fragment”) – the latter reference is the more relevant as the book, like Coleridge’s lyric, often has the quality of a dream or a drug-induced vision (and the two characters indeed smoke opium). Yet Calvino, contrary to Coleridge, achieves this dream quality by stripping down his language to bare essentials, a stylistic feature that he admired in Kafka, who, according to him, was “using a language so transparent that it reaches a hallucinatory level” (an interview with Alexander Stille, Saturday Review, March/April 1985).
The spell of this hallucination is often so strong that you feel you are reading the most beautiful book ever written: you lose yourself in it as in a labyrinth, but when you have found your way again, you realise that there must be a secret mechanism governing it all – there is something suspicious about the repetitions, the anachronisms (skyscrapers and motorcycles in the 13th century?).
Most probably, there is a set of rules according to which the book has been written – after all, Calvino belonged to Oulipo (Ouvroir de litérature potentielle, Workshop of potential literature), a gathering of authors interested in the effects of applying mathematically strict rules to the process of writing. However, you do not need to know – or even suspect the existence of – any rules to enjoy the book, just as you do not need to know anything about architecture to experience a city.
A book of cities, a book of names
“But what is Calvino’s book about?” You may ask. It is a book about cities: Diomira, Isidora, Despina, Dorothea, Zirma, Anastasia, Fedora, Eutropia (Europe + entropy?), and many others. Calvino loves names and naming. The act of naming is an attempt to pin something down, to separate it from other phenomena.
In the course of reading, however, it turns out that all these cities may in fact be different facets, and faces, of Venice. The multiplication of names becomes an act of embracing the city in all its richness and diversity; it is a confession of love, but also an elegy (the Oulipo members exhibit a mild obsession with Venice: Georges Perec and Harry Mathews have written an essay in which they attempt to prove that in his work Raymond Roussel, their literary hero and predecessor, has encrypted the topography of Venice – a city which he had never visited).
It is certainly a book about the way we make sense of our lives through telling stories and listening to them.
It is also about the dangers of following one’s dreams, passions and desires, to the end. Yet, it shows that, however destructive this may be, the side effects may be beautiful, like cities, or become a trap, like the city of Zobeide:
“They tell this tale of its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive’s trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again.”
In a word, Calvino’s Invisible Cities is an impossible book, just as he wanted it to be (the quote comes from his 1983 New York lecture): “Most of the books I have written and those I intend to write originate from the thought that it will be impossible for me to write a book of that kind: when I have convinced myself that such a book is completely beyond my capacities of temperament or skill, I sit down and start writing it.”
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, translated from the Italian by William Weaver.
Adam Zdrodowski is a poet and translator; he has published three collections of poetry and translated authors such as Gertrude Stein, William S. Burroughs. He lives in Warsaw, Poland.
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