Invisible Cities (Paperback)

"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his." So begins Italo Calvino's compilation of fragmentary urban images. As Marco tells the khan about Armilla, which "has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be," the spider-web city of Octavia, and other marvelous burgs, it may be that he is creating them all out of his imagination, or perhaps he is recreating details of his native Venice over and over again, or perhaps he is simply recounting some of the myriad possible forms a city might take. This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

This is an infuriating and exquisite fantasy which takes outrageous liberties with maps. Marco Polo is brought before the Kublai Khan and obliged to describe 55 of the cities he has encountered on his journeys. There is the earth-hating town of Baucis where everything is raised on stilts, the spiderweb city of Octavia, the woven metropolis of Eudoxia where citizens are lost among the cloth and threads... Of course, you'll not find any of these mesmerizing places in an atlas unless it is an atlas of daydreams. These are cities far too playful and beguiling to be real. (Kirkus UK)

These cities are apparitions - an architecture of pure quality - and they are a triumph of comprehension in a post-modern world. Since Cosmicomics, his rather Aquarian history of the universe, Calvino has been working diligently toward that end: to create a mode of fiction that fully incorporates structuralist and semiological ideas; that can transpose something human to the awful dimensionless spaces they imply; that could, if it had to, stand in affirmation through the climax of planetary culture. If this sounds a bit extreme, it comes in response to a conceptual revolution at least as drastic as that presented by Freud in the '30's; and backed up as it is by so many manifest signs of dissolution it may be only slightly anticipating a general state of mind. The assumption of the invisible cities is that we will, no matter what, always have recognitions to share in common and that they may be essential ones. The setting is elegaic in its unworldliness and fineness. Kublai Khan is old now and will never see all the cities compassed by his empire. It is given to Marco Polo to describe them; but because the time is short, and there are so many cities, he must distill from each one the quality that makes it itself and no other. The conversation begins at the level of poetry - with emblems, gestures and finally images - and as their understanding ripens, Marco and the Khan begin to enact the slow, equally essential phases of habituation and exhausted wonder. Their communication still represents a leap of faith equal surely to any jump God-ward; only this time it is a social faith in the continued correspondence of our private universes and the prospect of enduring community. (Kirkus Reviews)