Invisible Cities grows with every reading

 I first read Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino in 2019, late fall, early winter. At the time, I wrote that I should reread the book every six months and I’d have a new interpretation of the book every time.

And over that next six months: Covid. Lockdown. Remote schooling. And after that, I took on a new career and moved across the country. So, the whole world changed and I changed a bit as well. And it took me four years to go back to Invisible Cities.

The book is a fictional travelogue, Marco Polo describing cities to Kublai Khan. The bulk of the book consists of fifty-five descriptions of cities that Wikipedia describes as poems. Each chapter is bracketed by conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.

And this is not an exercise in world building. Not only are the cities not connected together, they feel like exercises in thought experiment, breaking down the concept of place. Calvino has been described as an iconoclast and Invisible Cities can easily be exhibit A for that argument.

One of my favorite sequences in the book is still Polo and Khan discussing whether or not they are real. When, in fact, these versions of them are not real and are fictional constructs. Calvino doesn’t just break the fourth wall. He sets it on fire and dances on the ashes.

When I first was Invisible Cities, I was pulled into its deconstructionist, iconoclast nature. This time, I found myself more focused on each city as a poem, as an individual work of art. I began (digitally) underlining the bits that really struck me. 

I didn’t remember the spiderweb city of Octavia from my first reading. This time, it was the most memorable city for me. Suspended over a vast chasm, the inhabitants have less uncertainty than other people. They know the net will only last so long.

I haven’t read nearly enough Calvino but I think that Invisible Cities is one of his most accessible books.

Invisible Cities - an inner atlas

I stumbled upon Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino by completely by accident with no idea what it was about or its reputation as a great book/modern classic. Which might be a very appropriate way to fall down this rabbit hole of literature. 

The book consists of fifty-five descriptions of cities, interspersed with conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Kahn. Which sounds pretty simple. Marco Polo describing cities to Kublai Kahn.

Except that it isn’t simple. The cities are fantastical, impossible cities. Sometimes anachronistic, sometimes magical, sometimes just plain bizarre. The book is a dreamscape of cities that have never been and could never be.

And it’s not even clear that Marco Polo and Kublai Kahn are real themselves. One or the other might be imaginary. Except that they are just characters in a book. They really are imaginary!

My personal favorite interpretation (and it’s not my only one) is that the book is deconstruction of the very concept of places. The cities say more about the person who is describing the cities than the cities themselves. Invisible Cities doesn’t tell us about places. It asks questions about the human condition.

What is real? What is unreal? And what do we get out of the unreal, what do we need from the unreal?

Invisible Cities isn’t just a book that I’m glad that I read. It’s a book I want to reread every six months to see what has changed in it, what new things I get out of it. It is a classic and it really asks you to explore concepts you hadn’t realized you accepted.

Italo Calvino makes me want to play impossible games

Reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, I have a craving to design a game about creating cities in a few paragraphs, developing a map of urban worlds. Which means I’m completely missing the point of the book :P

The book has Marco Polo describing fifty-five cities to a bemused Kublai Kahn. He breaks the cities down into eleven categories and they all have women’s names. Beneath this poetic atlas structure is a deconstruction of language and geography.

Or so reviews and analysis of Invisible Cities tells me. I don’t grok that yet. In fact, I feel like I should be rereading the book again in six months and see how much it’s changed for me over that time.

So my desire to make a game out of it is based on the most superficial reading of it. But it’s still there.

I picture a set of tables. On your turn, roll to see what category the city is. Roll to see what name it is. Roll to see what details you are allowed to describe, like architecture or trade goods or monuments or such. From those rolls, you create a city in a few words.

Perhaps there might be two tables of categories and you must find where the city you are dreaming up fits on the matrix, turning a spreadsheet grid into a map of imagination.

Or perhaps the city that you dream of must fit onto a postcard. And after you have written your city into existence on your postcard, you must put a stamp on it and send it to the next player, letting them know it is their turn to bring a city to life on a postcard. And at the end, everyone has a physical artifact of a city that has only come to be due to the game.

Aaaaand I’ve just crossed the line from game to performance art. Probably the kind of performance art that would end up annoying everyone involved.

I’m actually not even halfway through Invisible Cities and I know it’s not a book about world building but more of world unbuilding. My feeble understanding makes it feel more about how you describe a place says more about you than the place.

But it still makes me want to build dreamy worlds.