Invisible Cities

Early in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, he describes a moment when some of the characters walk near a cathedral and are able to hear "its bells ringing changes, mostly just tuneless sequences of notes, but sometimes a pretty melody would tumble out, like an unexpected gem from the permutations of the I Ching". Similarly, in this collection of descriptions of imaginary cities, sometimes each metropolitan litany produced an arresting simile or piece of imagery, and sometimes they were just a few paragraphs of "literary" writing that made next to no impression at all on me. I don't want to be contrarian, but is this book really so highly-regarded based merely on the neat sentences Calvino sometimes comes up with? It can't be the philosophical ideas, because those are either somewhat boring, or unoriginal, or both.

For an example of boring, in "Cities & Eyes 1", Marco Polo is telling Kublai Khan about the city of Valdrada on the shores of a lake, where "the traveler, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside down. Nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, because the city was so constructed that its every point would be reflected in its mirror.... The twin cities are not equal, because nothing that exists or happens in Valdrada is symmetrical: every face and gesture is answered, from the mirror, by a face and gesture inverted, point by point. The two Valdradas live for each other, their eyes interlocked; but there is no love between them." If I were writing a paper on this book in a freshman English class, I would say that the story "was an exploration of the concept of duality" or something like that, but it isn't: the whole description of the city is barely a few hundred words, and does nothing other than describe a city and its watery doppelgänger. Similarly, for an example of unoriginality, at the beginning of chapter 7 there is an exchange between Polo and the Khan about the difficulty of telling the difference between dreams and reality:

"Kublai: Perhaps this dialogue of ours is taking place between two beggars nicknamed Kublai Khan and Marco Polo; as they shift through a rubbish heap, piling up rusted flotsam, scraps of cloth, wastepaper, while drunk on the few sips of bad wine, they see all the treasure of the East shine around them.
Polo: Perhaps all that is left of the world is wasteland covered in rubbish heaps, and the hanging garden of the Great Khan's palace. It is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which is outside."

It's like Calvino is expecting his audience to have never heard of Zhuang Zi's dream of the butterfly, or any of the zillion other manifestations of this idea.

Even the central conceit of the book, that Polo is describing the city of Venice by describing its opposites or metaphors for it, doesn't feel like it needs a whole book to describe it, even one as thin as this. Not that it isn't a pleasant read, with excellent descriptions and use of language and so forth, but I simply had no reaction to most of it. Exceptions include "Cities & Desire 3", which vividly describes how different a city can look depending on how you arrive; "Cities & Names 4", about the cyclic nature of urban life; "Cities & the Dead 3", with its vivid vital necropolis; and a few others, but for me most of the pleasure lay in the combinations of words Calvino found (and how translator William Weaver interpreted them), and not really in any of the concepts. I make an exception for the conversation between Polo and Khan at the end of chapter 7, which hilariously sounds exactly like two people having a bad drug experience.

"Kublai: To me this conjecture does not seem to suit our purposes. Without them we could never remain here swaying, cocooned in our hammocks.
Polo: Then the hypothesis must be rejected. So the other hypothesis is true: they exist and we do not.
Kublai: We have proved that if we were here, we would not be.
Polo: And here, in fact, we are."

Whoa dude, far out!

Ever read that Borges short story "The Lottery in Babylon"? Despite its greater economy with language, it's about ten times more memorable than most of what's in here. ( )

Perhaps I read this book wrong and didn’t savor the ideas sufficiently, but I didn’t find it remarkable. There were moments of poetic grace and Borgesian fancy, but the city chapters felt like intros to 55 different sci-fi books that cut off abruptly. Many of the sentences were just random lists of adjective and noun pairs with no discernible verb to announce action other than their existence. And there were a LOT of naked women lounging around in public urban spaces to fuel the male conqueror fantasy. ( )

As a child I remember being mesmerized by a collection of fairy tales. I could read with proficiency for my age – maybe 6 or 7 – but much of the meaning escaped me, although I could sense, or guess, much of it. At the end, it did not matter, because I was enthralled by the images and language.

Invisible Cities took me back to that early reading experience. I felt lost at times, searching for the meaning when the surreal and exotic images made me drunk. There is a philosophical deepness to this book, which is very elusive: almost impossible to grasp, just glimpse. Yet, at moments, it surprisingly takes form and content with obvious clarity.

How to define it? A series of poetic parables with ambiguous meanings, surprises and fantastic geography? Dreams or nightmares full of longing, desire and enchantment? A travel book for terra incognita?
Probably all of the above and none of it.

I loved it!
( )

I have never been to Venice but I’m from an island where all the trees were cut down hundreds of years ago in order to build it. The trees never grew back and now it’s just barren, just shrubs and rocks. It’s weird to conceptualize Venice as a city that exists because of that absence. Like it’s a puzzle piece that fits perfectly into the crater of this island to make it whole. Anyway, that’s not really relevant to this book.

Calvino, flexing his descriptive writing muscles, paints pretty pictures here. It’s dreamy and serene. A pick-up-and-put-down kind of book. ( )

I'm not sure I completely understood everything in this odd little book, but it has an interesting premise that is going to make me see cities in quite a different light from now on (well, when we're allowed to travel again, anyway!).

Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan stories of what seems like many different cities. Then we find out that they're all about the same city - Venice. Some of the cities are truly fantastical in nature, while others are more mundane. My favourite was Eusapia in Cities & The Dead 3, where a duplicate of the city lies underground to house the dead, "to continue their former activities". Chilling!

I think this is a book to savour over many weeks or even months, taking in one city in each reading session. I read it very quickly because it's the subject of one of my MA seminars this coming week, and I probably didn't take in as much as I should have! I'm hoping the discussion will shed some light on the more opaque themes of the book. ( )