Book Review : Invisible Cities

Book : Invisible Cities
Author : Italo Calvino
First Published in 1972
Translated from the Italian by William Weaver


A strange, fantastic book, Invisible Cities describes dialogues between Marco Polo, the traveler, and Kublai Khan, the emperor. It has no plot as such -- no beginning, no development of characters , no characters, for that matter, except for the two mentioned above) -- but it does have a sad, bittersweet ending.
Polo describes each city by focusing on some dominant characteristic of its geographical situation, its building arrangements, its social practices, or much more subtle matters, occasionally explicitly indicating the major consequence of that dominant trait.


One clue to what Calvino wants to tell us about cities lies in the subdivisions of the book. The
fifty-five descriptions consist of eleven sets of five cities each, under a variety of headings: Cities and memory, Cities and desire, Cities and signs, Thin cities, Trading cities, Cities and eyes, Cities and names, Cities and the dead, Cities and the sky, Continuous cities, Hidden cities. These are interleaved in a complicated numerical order whose meaning is not apparent.
Under each heading, things can be said about cities and surprising features called to our attention. Some features are mundane physical facts, some point to aspects of how people respond to cities, some are fanciful "what ifs" which challenge our belief in some ordinarily unquestioned feature of what we believe as normal life.


For the most part, at least until toward the end of the book, he describes not real cities, in many cases not cities which could exist at all, not if we take the descriptions literally, though perhaps if they are seen as metaphors. But even so some descriptions do seem to talk about recognizable cities. Esmeralda made up of both streets and canals, is easily taken as a semi-realistic version of Venice, though the observations he makes about it are perhaps not what we would expect. As you read along these short descriptions, real cities of the past and present seem to appear in the conversations of the two men, and even imaginary cities of literature and myth.


Calvino means us to think that these cities transcend time. This idea appears explicitly from time to time in the conversations of Khan and Polo. For all the specific detail of Polo's descriptions, they do not exemplify to a specific historical period or real place but rather describe features of urban life and organization that, though they take different forms in different places, are nevertheless universal.
The short descriptions of cities contain ideas Calvino means us to apply beyond the particular imaginary city Polo is talking about. We learn, for instance, that Eutropia (a "trading city") is made up of many cities, all but one of them empty, and that its inhabitants periodically tire of their lives, their spouses, their work, and then move en masse to the next city, where they will have new mates, new houses, new jobs, new views from their windows, new friends, pastimes, and subjects of gossip. We learn further that, in spite of all this moving, nothing changes. Since, although different people are doing them, the same jobs are being done and, though new people are talking, the same things are being gossiped about. This suggests a sociological generalization: in every city there is a body of social practices--forms of marriage, or work, or habitation-- which don't change much, even though the people who perform them are continually replaced through the ordinary demographic processes of birth, death, immigration, and emigration.


The ultimate city in the book, Berenice expands more explicitly upon the interplay of the just and unjust. Berenice, like an onion, contains layers within layers of alternating micro-cities, oscillating between the just and unjust. Calvino’s message is optimistic here: even in a world of evil there is the origin of a better society that can be nurtured and grown from within.
While the entire book, up 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.
After contemplating the Great Khan’s atlas that includes every imaginary city of fiction , Polo pessimistically states that we are already living in an unjust world, an “inferno.” Polo suggests two methods for escaping the inferno: “The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”