Marco Polo describes for Kublai Khan the cities he has visited in his travels. Calvino writes of intentions and memories, movement and perception, deliberation and abandonment. The world is what our minds make of it, he seems to be saying. The same with this book, which reads like a series of prose poems, artful, suggestive and wondering.

“From there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein. They tell this tale of its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive’s trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again.”

Magic Hat HOWL Winter
Brooklyn IPA

Kublai Khan (a stately pleasure dome did decree), ailing and aware that his empire is failing, takes to regaling himself with a geography lesson from a young Marco Polo. Interestingly, the two actually did meet in 1271-2. Of course, we'll never know what actually transpired in their time together, but I can only hope it was something similar to what Calvino portrays. A wonderfully manipulative and playful contribution from the greatest Cuban-Italian author I can think of. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1343399...

No actual plot, just a series of very short vignettes of cities each of which embodies some aspect of human social interactions, told as a set of reminiscences by Marco Polo to his ruler / leader / captor, the Great Khan. Some of them are pretty vivid; they would have been more memorable if I weren't on a red-eye flight reading them. ( )

This is one of those odd books that when your done and put it down, your not sure why you read it; your just glad you did. A fascinating journey that was most enjoyable in a painful way. ( )

Marco Polo describes the many cities he's visited to Kublai Khan. Between the city descriptions Polo and Khan talk. This is Invisible Cities. If you're looking for story, if you're looking for character, if you're looking for lost symbols conjured up by a certain Brown... you won't find it here. You will find wonderful ideas and beautiful descriptions of cities and people. This was a little book that required a slow reading to enjoy the dense writing of Calvino.

One day I hope to look up at the city of Baucis and wave.

'After a seven days' march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foliage.

There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.' ( )