INVISIBLE CITIES
Italo Calvino, 1972
Invisible Cities is a book about cities. It is about surreal cities, imaginary ones, impossible ones. It is about the story of each city and the lessons that you learn from these cities. It is also a book about people. About the people who inhabit these cities. About the imagination of the ones who talk about these cities. But mostly, it is a book about us (the reader). It talks about our dreams and aspirations. It revolves around our perception and understanding of these cities. A lot of things about these cities are open to our interpretation and imagination. Every reader would have his own unique and personal reaction to it.
The book is knit around a few profound conversations between Marco Polo, a merchant and traveller from Venice and Kublai Khan, the Emperor of the Tartars. Marco describes the many cities he has visited during his travels. His accounts are interspersed with voids. This allows room for self interpretation and thereby gives a certain virtue to his descriptions. Kublai doesn’t necessarily believe everything he says, but nevertheless enjoys discussing, visualising and arguing with him.
Calvino doesn’t dwell on the physical aspects of the city much. Even through his descriptions of the dome or the tower, he manages to convey the feel of the city. The emotional aspect of the city. Every city has its own story to tell. He carves a corridor for our thoughts and lets us create our own image of the place. Though some of the cities were described in simple literal terms, most of them are bound to make the reader think. Not just think, but visualise our own version of the city. The visuals coming to your head would conjure a totally new meaning and dimension to it.
All these cities are actually all part of a larger city. In Marco’s case it is Venice, his home town. It encompasses all these invisible cities. Every part of your city has a character and these, with a little imagination is capable of invoking images of new cities. He never described Venice as such because he felt that ‘Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased’.
By the time you finish the book, your brain is clogged with so many images of so many cities that the differences begin to null. I got the feeling that this was intentionally done by Calvino. He successfully manages to put us in Marco Polo’s shoes. You realise that none of the descriptions were faithful accounts. They were just muddled up accounts of a jaded traveller. After a point, there is so much information to digest that the line between your imagination and reality begins to blur. You are no longer capable of giving a faithful description of the places you have visited.
You become the jaded traveller.
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