Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino (Le città invisibili, 1972)
translated from the Italian by William Weaver (1974)
Mariner Books Classics (1978)
165 pp
The only other novel by Italo Calvino that I’ve read is If on a winter’s night a traveler…, a book that I enjoyed on some level but that I also failed to connect to in the way I’d hoped. Recently one of my book clubs picked Invisible Cities, and to cut to the chase: I absolutely loved it.
The book is setup as a conversation between the explorer Marco Polo and the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan. Kublai has asked Polo to describe some of the cities Polo has visited on his travels. And so we get absolutely beautiful and thought-provoking descriptions of 55 fictional cities, interspersed with short interruptions in which Kublai and Polo interrogate the power of language to evoke so much, not just physical descriptions and sensations but also metaphysical subjects like memory and death.
The descriptions of cities Marco Polo visited had this virtue: you could wander through them in thought, become lost, stop and enjoy the cool air, or run off.
William Weaver’s translation is absolutely up to the task of doing the same. I myself felt transported and often found myself deeply reflective as I read the passages.
There are many other ways to discuss this book — its conflicts, its structure, its names — and I’m really glad that I found it. Like a great volume of poetry, I anticipate I will revisit it often in part and in whole.
Loved it too, like all Calvino’s books I have read, and OULIPO authors in general, but If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is still my favorite by him.
I would like to reread If on a winter’s night a traveler… now that I loved this one so much. And I agree — I love Oulipo authors generally!