This book is more of a thought experiment than a story. It reminded me very strongly of the book Einstein's Dreams, by Alan Lightman, which is a thought experiment about time, whereas Calvino's is about cities. Between the two I strongly prefer the former, although it's hard to say why. ( )

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Cosa si può scrivere de Le città invisibili? O di Calvino in generale? Se come me amate le prose senza fronzoli e di quella semplicità che riesce come nient’altro a raccontare la matassa inestricabile delle cose della vita e della morte, non mancate di leggervi qualcosa di Calvino.

Le città invisibili è una guida alle città dei territori sotto il dominio di Kublai Kan, che si fa raccontare da Marco Polo le loro caratteristiche. Nella lettura, è facile scoprire somiglianze con le nostre città e noi abitanti, in un intreccio che ci rivela parti di noi stessз, a loro volta riflesse negli spazi che abitiamo.

È per questo che ogni rilettura de Le città invisibili ci dirà qualcosa di diverso: in momenti diversi della nostra vita avremo bisogno di concentrarci e riflettere su fili diversi della matassa e sentiremo più vicina quella o quell’altra città, quello o quell’altro scambio tra Kublai Kan e Marco Polo.

A questo giro non ho potuto fare a meno di essere colpita dalle possibilità perse, dalle città malate e dall’importanza di vedere gli sprazzi di luce e farli brillare nonostante il fumo acre degli incendi.

Solo se conoscerai il residuo d’infelicità che nessuna pietra preziosa arriverà a risarcire, potrai computare l’esatto numero di carati cui il diamante finale deve tendere, e non sballerai i calcoli del tuo progetto dall’inizio.

Grazie, Calvino. Alla prossima. ( )

Invisible Cities is one of six entries for Italo Calvino (1923-1985) in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. The other five are

• The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969, translated into English 1977, on my TBR);


• If On a Winter's Night, a Traveller (1979, translated 1981, see my review;


• Our Ancestors (1960, translated into English 1962. This is the 'heraldic trio' comprising The Cloven Viscount, (1952, translated 1959) The Baron in the Trees (1957, translated 1959, on my TBR) and The Nonexistent Knight, 1959, translated 1962);


• The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947, translated 1947 and revised 1998. I have this on order); and


• Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988, essays, translated 1993)

(Links on the titles are to Wikipedia.)

(1001 Books does not include The Complete Cosmicomics (1997), probably because it's not a novel, it's a collection of short stories, one of which I reviewed recently.)

The citation for Invisible Cities from 1001 Books says that:

[caption id="attachment_122897" align="alignright" width="106"] 1st Italian edition, 1972, Einaudi[/caption]

Invisible Cities is constructed as a series of imaginary travel anecdotes told to the Tartar emperor Kublai Khan by the Venetian explorer Marco Polo. Fifty-five prose pieces each describe a different fabulous city and each contains a conceptual or philosophical puzzle or enigma. Zemrude, for example, is a city that changes according to the mood of the beholder. It is divided into upper and lower parts, windowsills and fountains above gutters and wastepaper below. The upper world is known chiefly through the memory of those whose eyes now dwell on the lower. (1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, edited by Peter Boxall, 2006 Edition, Quintet Publishing 2006, p 632.)

But it was the article at Wikipedia that offered me a schematic way to read it...

Invisible Cities is structured in 9 chapters, each prefaced by a conversation between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, and followed by a coda where they reflect on the cities just described. Like Alexander the Great who could not maintain control of the lands he had conquered, the Khan is bothered from outset of the story that the size of his empire makes it impossible for him to know it all. The more it expands, the more it inevitably results in places too far from civilisation to be 'healed' and corruption is inevitable. So the Khan tends to be a bit testy, and Marco Polo has to walk a tightrope between maintaining his own intellectual authority and respect for the all-powerful ruler of a mighty empire. In Calvino's deconstruction of the travel literature genre, Marco Polo is not just a merchant-traveller or an entertainer, he is also a politician and philosopher, one who must always be one step ahead of the emperor. The mental atlas of the empire is eventually likened to a chess board and it is a duel that the emperor does not want to lose.

Like chess, a game of patterns, logic and strategy, the story is framed mathematically.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/07/26/invisible-cities-1972-by-italo-calvino-trans... ( )

Absolutely fascinating. The book comprises of Marco Polo describing surreal, fantastic cities to Kublai Khan. That's the book.

This book really reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges, where each story is a puzzle, and looks to be the size of the puddle, but you dip your toe in, and it reveals the depth of the ocean. The description of each city was only a page long, two at the very most. Yet, each one felt so real, and often would have some sort of philosophical quandary, which would leave me thinking long after finishing.

This feels like a book that gets even better on rereads. ( )

Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.

Reading the “Text”

Invisible Cities is a text which is always ‘talking about itself,' and has often been called a meta-textual work - a reading explicitly invoked by the narrative. Stricto sensu the cities described do not exist – could not possibly exist – yet this statement of fact lies in tension with Calvino’s intention for the work. In his lifetime, Calvino has repudiated the critique of this work as a pure intellectual abstraction / commentary on ‘Structuralism.’ I concur this is not a work of theory (Calvino is not the eminent theoretician). The basis of this repudiation i.e. that Invisible Cities is a work concerning the ‘real world’ of ‘lived experience’ is something I will entertain in this piece. To substantiate this reading, it is necessary to demonstrate ‘the possibility of a possibility (existence),’ by proceeding in the opposite direction of the usual critique of the text. If we are to take Calvino seriously, we must also ‘take the joke seriously’ and do something few readers would ever contemplate: we must understand the invisible cities as possible actually-existing structures. From Calvino’s “meta-text” we will re-construct the “text” itself to produce/read the “text” which the work is ostensibly about. (What is the “text” of the living city which could be summarized into the “meta-text” Polo produces in the form of this novel? What is the sub-text within the text i.e. what is the kind of text which could be written by someone living in the “textual” city? How closely does the “sub-text” correspond to Calvino’s meta-textual summary of the text and what are the points of friction between these readings? Where is the “text” no longer possible? )

How to Read a City: to illustrate a point

Chloe; city of strangers imagining encounters with each other. A city which can only exist in fragments of spaces. Perhaps Chloe manifests on the sidewalk of the financial district, or as “luxury dissolved into the atmosphere” in the hyper-modern movement of “staring at your phone.” One can imagine living in the Foucauldian work-house in which intercourse is forbidden, but this is not the city we are presented. The sub-text i.e. the text written by a resident of this city is easy to imagine (the romantic novel). Polo is perceptive to appreciate a craving for connection, the sensibility of constantly imagining a thousand interactions. The “sub-text” closely mirrors Polo’s “meta-text” but neither captures the “text”. The kind of writing which exacerbates the sensation of divorce and alienation and/or craving for connection thrives most where these connections are omnipresent in real life and intentionally denied. In fact, the physical correspondence of the city of strangers is the one between “ex’s,” of the glance met but intentionally refused. Meanwhile the visiting observer is not astute enough to notice the frequent connections which are always denied between people on the street.

Eutropia; city of nomads moving between fixed structures. A city which can only exist for one person. A city where the most brutal totalitarianism is confused for lighthearted fancy; presented as a concerted decision to move between locations at the moment everyone is “fed up with life” and wants a new story (metaphor for reading books). But there are two kinds of people neglected from the meta-text, those who are not yet ready to leave, and those who have long since been fed up. In reality, every person is either one or the other, nobody is “ready” to go except the one person for whom it is exactly the right time. Likely there are many who are ‘forging ahead’ and are already establishing themselves in the next city before the council has made the decision to move. These are not included in the narrative as they proceed before Polo. The question is what retributive action is prescribed by the city council for these transgressions, and does it mirror the one inflicted by the gestapo when they discover those still hiding in the basements of their homes when the evacuation order has been given. The inclination of the citizen is in the dialectic between the desire for stasis (which repudiates forced movement) and the desire for a more rapid movement free of coercion (the gestapo has already co-opted the idea of revolution. The fanciful sub-text which corresponds to Calvino’s meta-text is produced in this city, but in the form of the propaganda leaflet (There is friction here). The other sub-text is circulating in the form of Sylvia Plath (hatred for life) Gerald Murnane (stasis) Gilles Deleuze ("more artifice") Walter Benjamin (the Messianic). Someone must have the patience to re-read and find the most appropriate cities to employ this method...

Calvino “Off the Rails”

The above exercise “opens” the text for us, perhaps only to enhance the appreciation of Invisible Cities with a writing exercise. It also allows us to recognize when Calvino goes “off the rails.” Where Calvino “closes” the text and abandons the connection to a cumbersome reality and becomes derailed (deranged). We enter the realm of base-less theory in these moments. Calvino’s “cities of the dead” – those filled up entirely with stone – are prima facie unimaginable as actually existing in the present tense. Everything then turns back upon ideas of narrative and writing (suitable construction for a writer who can only think about writing. Does everything turn back upon ideas of cheese for the cheesemonger?). Even deaths (and their cities) become metaphor for writing (the etiology is reversed). Try this exercise for yourself on some of the later passages.

Reading the Meta-Text

Philosophy appears to be a particularly weak link among writers of import (see Nabokov). (Analogous to Sontag’s critique that the best novelists are failed poets (also Nabokov)). The connection to the possibility of a recognizable reality is the root of Calvino’s strength in the text, although he is striving to get away from it all the time. Calvino’s philosophical ideas are most explicit in the abstracted conversation between Polo and Khan. The Idea here is the conception of language as the functional effects of felicitations between words. This establishes a brittle totalizing structure (Structuralism) which Calvino can subsequently repudiate to give the impression of a “complete” totality. (Trademark of Hermann Hesse)

"Contemplating the essential landscape [of the chessboard], Kublai reflected on the invisible order that sustains cities, on the rules that decreed how they rise, take shape […] and fall in ruins. At times he thought he was on the verge of discovering a coherent, harmonious system underlying the infinite deformities and discords […] Now Kublai Khan no longer had to send Marco Polo on distant expeditions: he kept him playing endless games of chess. Knowledge of the empire was hidden in the pattern drawn by the angular shifts of the knight, […] by the inexorable ups and downs of every game."

The structuralist notion of language as analogous to a game of chess already neglects the subtext of unrepresented signs which are in occult communication with the visible game and hold the key to interpreting any given collection of signs. E.g. In practice, Calvino’s chess language would never lead to an understanding of the function of ‘woke’ in the modern far-right discourse (‘woke’ can only be read as intelligible when substituted for n*****). But this is not unexpected; we have never gotten down to the level of the “text” in this novel (we have had to invent it ourselves); it follows that the theory that follows would be unable to perceive the “text” and the “sub-text” it implies. Calvino’s response to this conundrum is oblique:

“It was the game’s reason that eluded him. […] Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest […] was reduced to a square of planed wood. […] Then Marco Polo spoke: ‘[…] The square on which your enlightened gaze is fixed was cut from the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought: you see how its fibres are arranged? Here a barely hinted knot can be made out: a bud tried to burgeon on a premature spring day, but the night’s frost forced it to desist.’ The quantity of things that could be read in a little piece of smooth and empty wood overwhelmed Kublai; Polo was already talking about ebony forests, about rafts laden with logs that come down the rivers, of docks, of women at the windows …"

That the game neglects “real life” yet is in direct contact with it, is the planned response from the beginning, but this does not conclude the matter as Calvino would suggest. Once we have stepped away from the game to contemplate the chessboard itself, we are still at the level of meta-text which is a commentary on the descriptions of cities. We have not reached the “text” and we are not close to the “sub-text;” we have a metaphor pointing to another metaphor. Scraping mold off a cheese, you still only get to the surface of the cheese but not to the bottom of the cheese.
Now is as good a place as any to mention the prose, which is a kind of maximalist parenthetical fantasy writing, flowery in the pejorative sense. Calvino’s crimes of Prose have the same origin as his crimes of Theory: compulsive Variation. Here the commentary from our Magister Kierkegaard is relevant, “He does not limit himself […], but explains himself in more detail and dares to vary his language. Well, it is not as easy as one thinks to introduce variations. More than one student might have gotten High Honors if he had not introduced variations,” Calvino is always adding an extra word or turn of phrase at the end of a sentence, perhaps nice for first-time readers, but often this obfuscates his phrases:

“With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or its opposite, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires [… and fears.]”

So as not to appear banal, Calvino adds another noun to the ends of each sentence, but if we have learned anything from Deleuze, “fear” is already a kind of desire. Perhaps a minor critique of a minor variation, yet if we are to take ourselves to be the Lord of Hosts (not a stretch for Calvino’s prose), an unnecessary repetition (Moses striking the biblical stone) is enough to bar someone from the Promised Land (literary fame).

“Cities of Justice”

Calvino would like to return from the meta-narrative to “real life,” but the transition is not so easy. Perhaps one in one-hundred can make the “leap.” The penultimate presentation of Calvino’s grand vision of Justice, were it not couched in novelistic language, would be recognized as the insights you can get from reading essays of the undergraduate level:

"Having said this, [...] I must draw your attention to an intrinsic quality of this unjust city germinating secretly inside the secret just city: […] capable of reassembling a city still more just than it was before it became the vessel of injustice. But if you peer deeper into this new germ of justice you can discern a tiny spot that is spreading like the mounting tendency to impose what is just through what is unjust [...]"

Perhaps it would be equally meritorious (meretricious?) to argue that the impulse to effect justice by any means is the only true moment it possesses. The angel of justice is the retribution of injustice which defies speech (another failure of structuralism). The response to the holocaust is a justice which cannot even be put into words – any tortures enacted in the juridical context, however perverse, would be inadequate, therefore unjust. The biblical curse of ten generations is the closest we can get to putting these feelings to writing, but now one reads over these words and does not comprehend them. It is absurd that the innocents of subsequent generations should suffer the sins of the father, and even more absurd that the punishment should come to an end (this is infinite mercy in comparison with Damnation – a doctrine which is somehow taken lightly). And on the other hand, per Deleuze, “The guilty party escapes in the moment punishment is applied to the body and reifies a different person.” Even Calvino’s vision of Justice applied Justly is too heavy-handed. A more perfect punishment already anticipates this change and acts before it acts to capture the soul leaving the body. (I jest, but perhaps this is worth considering…) Calvino’s parting phrase is no less simplistic:

"And Polo said: ‘The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. 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.’"

Again, Calvino proceeds too quickly along the rut, first by assuming that the Inferno can even be recognized – that one could perceive the Inferno even with the maximum exertional effort. This is the fault Adorno perceives in the “grimacer” who ”admits awfulness too readily and therefore denies it” (online commentariat take note). That the desire to be able to say even one true thing would arrive at the movement of recognizing the inferno, this is a movement which Calvino neglects. He also gets the dialectic wrong. It is impossible to accept the inferno - this is the most difficult thing of all. One is already part of the inferno from the start but is unable to perceive it. To “seek and learn” is perhaps the first step in this process, but the Variation at the end of the sentence is non-sequitur – nothing is “not inferno” (we return to the Immaculate Conception).

Short-Circuiting the Impossible

The critical moment of novel appears unexpectedly. Rather early in the text, just as Calvino is begins to go off the rails, just as the perceptive reader recognizes the text as impossible fiction, we are treated to a direct conversation:

"Your Cities do not exist" […]

and in an unexpected reversal the Khan begins describing cities he hasn't seen:

"Kublai interrupted him: ‘From now I shall describe the cities and you will tell me if they exist and are as I have conceived them. I shall begin by asking you about a city of stairs, exposed to the sirocco, on a half-moon bay. Now I shall list some of the wonders it contains. ‘Sire, […] the city [already exists].’

This is an interesting process. Ignoring the obvious interpretation (all imaginings put to writing already exist as writing), we perceive an idea for arriving at something true. If we accept that, as Calvino states, "signs form a language but not the one you think you know" and that "there is no language without deceit," then by negating a negation we can proceed toward a negative truth. The idea is moving backward, ejecting signs and signifiers, it knows from the start that every narrative, even and especially the true notes, are false. A false city in fiction which is aware of itself as false dares itself to be true by a kind of double negation. Proceeding from an intentional origin of falsehood, this is the Benjaminian “always start from a false position,” with the addition of Kierkegaard’s earnestness. The inferno (realm of falsehood), by necessity of its existence and our dwelling in it, is the condition for its own transcendence. “Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words […], actions […] and in what order and rhythm; […] gesture is enough;” ( )