It’s
4pm on a Friday afternoon. I sit alone at the dining room table. There’s a
cheap, half-finished bottle of Sauvignon Blanc standing incongruously to the
right of my open laptop. I stare at the laptop willing words to appear on the
stark white screen. In one hand I have a book, its pages covered in
highlighting with notes in the margins, in the other, an almost empty glass of
wine. My hope is that I will somehow bring order to the indiscernible mass of
ideas swirling in my head. Or maybe that’s just the alcohol. The names repeat
endlessly – Esmeralda, Despina, Hypatia, Chloe, Clarice – 55 names, 55 places,
or just one place?
The
cause of my consternation is the book I hold in my left hand: Invisible Cities. A short, unusual
travel novel written in 1972 by
Italian author and Communist devotee, Italo Calvino (1923 – 1985). I’ve read and reviewed literature composed of
abstract philosophical ideas and complex language before – Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, Voltaire’s Candide, the complete works of William Shakespeare, to name only a
few. However, none have left me with such an overwhelming sense that I have
only just scratched the surface to expose the hidden gems within the text. The
book is captivating, not for its plot or storyline, which are glaringly absent,
but simply for its ability to touch a deeper part of the soul and arouse that
magical sense of curiosity which is so often lacking in our fast-paced and information-saturated
society. I realise I am a traveller, treading a unique path through the pages
of Invisible Cities.
Although
Calvino’s novel is considered to be from the travel genre, my initial interest
in Invisible Cities was sparked by
the historical aura surrounding Marco Polo and Kublai Khan as it appealed to
the history lover in me. On the surface, the book is a series of fictional
interactions occurring between a 13th century Tartar Emperor called
Kublai Khan and a young Venetian explorer, Marco Polo. Khan senses that his
Empire is coming to an end and is understandably troubled by it. Only through
Polo’s accounts of his travels to remote provinces is Khan “able to discern,
through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so
subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing” (p. 5). The pattern the Emperor is
referring to is Polo’s expeditions to 55 cities across the Empire. Narrated in
lyrical prose, and framed by philosophical dialogue between Khan and Polo, descriptions
of the 55 cities are divided between 11 thematic categories, including ‘Cities
& Memory,’ ‘Hidden Cities,’ and ‘Cities & the Sky.’ Polo’s cities are
enticing and fascinating places, where things are never quite as they seem. In
the crystalline blue lagoons of the city of Hypatia, “crabs were biting the
eyes of the suicides, stones tied around their necks” (p. 40).
At
first it is difficult to engage with Invisible
Cities as every ‘conventional’ element you would expect from a travel novel
is missing. There is no clear storyline, little character development, and no signposted
route or final destination to guide the reader to a tidy conclusion. Calvino also
appears to be allergic to small, simple words and phrases, opting instead for rich
imagery and daring use of metaphors, for example: “A voluptuous vibration stirs
Chloe, the most chaste of cities,” in an unending “carousel of fantasies” and
“ephemeral dreams” (p. 44). A combination of complex vocabulary, double
meanings and a disorientating style of lyrical prose makes for a slow,
time-consuming read. Take Marco Polo’s account of what he calls the “true
essence” of Anastasia: “Such is the power, sometimes called malignant,
sometimes benign, that Anastasia, the treacherous city, possesses…your labour
which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are
enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only it slave” (p. 10). Despite the
novels slim size, I found myself having to pause every two or three paragraphs
to process what I had just read.
The
beauty of discovery lies in persistence. At some indiscernible point, you
realise that Calvino is not merely describing cities, at least not in the way
we normally think of cities as physical constructs of concrete and steel.
Calvino’s cities are creations formed from ideas, thoughts, and questions. Kublai
Khan plays the role of a model reader within
the text, guiding and shaping our own range of responses as readers of Invisible Cities. Like Khan, a reader
must abandon any preconceived notions of what a travel book should be, and
instead “take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the
answer it gives to a question of yours. Or the question it asks of you.” (p.
38). Only by freeing yourself “from the images which in the past had announced
to me the things I sought” can you succeed in “understanding the language of
Hypatia” (p. 41), and ultimately, Invisible
Cities.
To
me, Invisible Cities does not contain
a single meaning, instead it is composed of three intertwined threads of
questions and ideas. Firstly, Invisible
Cities is a critique of human nature. Many of Polo’s cities reflect some
aspect of human behaviour, and serve as metaphors for vanity, greed, lust,
desire, etc… In Beersheba, the citizens are so “intent of piling up carats of
perfection” that it is “only when [they] shit, [that they are] not miserly,
calculating, greedy” (p. 101).The people within cities are so consumed by their
own internal weaknesses that they are blinded to happiness. In Raissa, the “city
of sadness,” beneath the surface of bad dreams characterising daily life there
is “a happy city unaware of its own existence” (p.134). The question Calvino
seems to be asking the reader to grapple with is a big one: How then should we
live?
As
well as being a study of humanity, Invisible
Cities is also a set of cautionary tales which warn of what will happen if
we, as humans, do not change how we act within our cities. The lines which
separate past, present, and future become blurred as Khan contemplates an
empire “covered with cities that weigh upon the earth and upon mankind, crammed
with wealth and traffic…swollen, tense, ponderous” (p. 65). There are clear references to capitalism,
suburban development, and consumerism throughout the text. The city of Trude
provides an example of the negative effects globalisation can have on culture. Globalisation
has the potential to create a world without differences “covered by a sole
Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport
changes” (p. 116). As Polo reminds the Emperor: “If you want to know how much
darkness is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights
in the distance” (p. 51). The warnings found in Invisible Cities are both timeless and timely. Like the citizens of
the spider-web city of Octavia, we must recognise that “the net will only last
so long” (p. 67). The question is: How long?
Invisible Cities is
however, at its core, still a travel book. Although Polo seemingly begins by describing
different cities he has visited, it soon becomes clear that he is actually talking
about one place: Venice. “Every time I describe a city I am saying something
about Venice…To distinguish the other cities’ qualities, I must speak first of
a city that remains implicit” (p. 78). For Polo, Esmeralda, Despina, Hypatia,
Chloe, and Clarice are all aspects of a single city. The true value in Invisible Cities lies not so much in its
vivid imagery or fascinating metaphors, but in the fact that the 55 cities also
merge to become a single city for each individual reader. For me, that city is
Auckland. My reading of Invisible Cities became
implicitly based on impressions of my home city. The sprawling urban mess of
Auckland is like Penthesilea which “spreads for miles around, a soupy city
diluted in the plain; pale buildings back to back…rusty suburb workshops and
warehouses,” where “you advance for hours and it is not clear to you whether
you are already in the city’s midst or still outside it” (p. 141). And so the
journey is not Marco Polo’s alone, I was also a traveller, treading a unique
path through the pages of Invisible
Cities.
For
the first half of Invisible Cities I
was lost and bewildered, but Calvino took me on a truly remarkable and
interesting journey, awakening within me an insatiable sense of curiosity about
my own city. The novel is an epistemological puzzle and its beauty lies in the
fact that the puzzle is constructed slightly differently every time you pick up
the book. Although Calvino’s style is
at first disorientating, if you are looking for something pleasingly different
or incredibly thought-provoking, I strongly recommend this little gem. Calvino
freely invites the collaboration of the reader – it is up to you to shape your
own experience of the text, filling in the blanks, imagining and substituting
your own city in the margins just as Kublai Khan is so eager to do.
It
is best, I believe, to read Invisible
Cities like a traveller, slowly and luxuriously with a glass of wine in one
hand, and as if you have all the time in the world.
Copyright Lydia Martin, 2014
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