REVIEW - INVISIBLE CITIES by Italo Calvino

Done by : Sumati Mattoo



The meaning of the Invisible cities is to be found not merely in Polo's words, but between words; not in things, but between things.


In 'Invisible Cities', Italo Calvino deals with the major crises of contemporary cities. Creating an imaginary world, the author seeks to delineate man's creative genius and to emphasise the complex challenges posed by our concept of modern cities. 


The author devises an allegorical world set in the reign of the Tartar emperor Kublai Khan, who establishes a relationship with Marco Polo, the great Venetian merchant. In this book, Khan expresses his tiredness of the stories brought to him by his messengers across the empire. Only the stories told by Polo, of the cities that he traversed during his travels, keep him interested.


The book consists of fifty-five extremely short city descriptions, embedded within an intellectual duel between Polo and Khan.
Marco Polo talks of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities.
Each city described by polo, bears a beautiful and arcane feminine name : Eudoxia, Zaira, Chole, etc. However, the imaginary cities do not appear on any of Khan's maps, nor it is clear if they exist in the past, present, or future.


These cities are rarely built of bland bricks and mortar. They are full of aluminium springs, silver domes, crystal, bronze, seashells, high bastions, curved arcades, nets, banisters, awnings, dirigibles, globes, pagodas, gratings, garrets, pilings, verandahs, parapets and porphyry steps. The cities are seldom peopled with characters, other than transitory ones, no plots, no events, but only timeless patterns in this metafictional narrative.
Although each of the nine thematic captions has five variations, every individual city has its own characteristic. At first, the cities are described in a positive vein, but gradually they become places of vice, decay and self destruction.


Even though Khan insists, Polo never talks about his own city, Venice. He only talks about strange, magical, invisible cities that nobody else ever saw.
And yet, Khan cannot avoid the feeling that by telling him about those nonexistent places, Polo does describe, bit by bit, the city they both really think of.
The cities symbolically represent themes such as love, death and our relationship with technology. At times, they also reflect our unattainable anxieties or desires.
But in the end, it could be concluded that whenever Polo spoke about all the other cities, he merely presents shadows, images, or replicas of his city, Venice.


While the entire novel until the final pages avoids preachy judgments and instead only hints slyly at the positive and negative aspects of our cities, the final snippet of dialogue between Polo and Khan is more direct. 
The book is set as an adventure of the mind, as a mathematical construction, that at the end leads to hours of pondering.
Despite its brevity, the book takes days to read -- at least, when read properly. After each story you have to stop; to think; to contemplate on the piece of poetry-in-prose that you have just encountered.
If you like plot-driven, rattling yarns then you’ll probably be disappointed. If you enjoy being amazed by extraordinary scenery and ideas fabricated with words then I think you’re more likely to be enchanted by Invisible Cities.