Source of book: Borrowed from the library
Invisible Cities consistently makes lists of the best short fiction. For this and other reasons, I have had it on my list for a while.
It is impossible to fully categorize this book, or even describe it. It is an imaginary conversation about cities between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, wherein Polo describes a series of cities, all of them imaginary and named after women, and Khan responds in the opening and closing of each chapter, often seeing the descriptions as philosophical rather than real.
The book owes much, of course, to Polo’s stories about his travels in the Mongol Empire (written down later by Rustichello da Pisa), and his often fantastic descriptions of places. I think it also is a nod to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fragment, “Kubla Khan.”
As I said, it is really hard to categorize. The structure is very detailed and mathematic, with 55 different cities described, in 9 chapters and 11 categories, and a spiral structure within the work.
There are other websites that can go into crazy detail about the structure and the meaning of each story. That is not my intent here.
I think it is sufficient to understand that the book is all metaphor, and that the cities say something about the human condition, mortality, community, inequality, and much, much more. One could read it over and over and still see new things.
For me, what struck me most is that for all the cities, there is a face and a flip side. Often, this is between the glamor of the public face contrasted with the underbelly. And, in a metaphorical sense, the good and bad of humanity, the public face and the private demons.
I wrote down a few of my favorite lines, but want to clarify that these are not necessarily the ones that are most important, or most thematic. I just liked them.
The first is from the opening.
There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies’ protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.
Thus for all empires, including the American one. As we are seeing unfold at this moment in time.
Some of the tension between Khan and Polo stems from their different perspectives. Khan is concerned about his empire, while Polo is all about the journey.
“The other ambassadors warn me of famines, extortions, conspiracies, or else they inform me of newly discovered turquoise mines, advantageous prices in marten furs, suggestions for supplying damascened blades. And you?” the Great Khan asked Polo, “you return from lands equally distant and you can tell me only the thoughts that come to a man who sits on his doorstep at evening to enjoy the cool air. What is the use, then, of all your traveling?”
“It is evening. We are seated on the steps of your palace. There is a slight breeze,” Marco Polo answered. “Whatever country my words may evoke around you, you will see it from such a vantage point, even if instead of the palace there is a village on pilings and the breeze carries the stench of a muddy estuary.”
I loved this observation, from Maurilia:
In Maurilia, the traveler is invited to visit the city, and, at the same time, to examine some old post cards that show it as it used to be: the same identical square with a hen in the place of the bus station, a bandstand in the place of the overpass, two young ladies with white parasoles in the place of the munitions factory. If the traveler does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one, though he must be careful to contain his regret at the changes within definite limits: admitting that the magnificence and prosperity of the metropolis Maurilia, when compared to the old, provincial Maurilia, cannot compensate for a certain lost grace, which, however, can be appreciated only now in the old post cards, whereas before, when that provincial Maurilia was before one’s eyes, one saw absolutely nothing graceful and would see it even less today, if Maurilia had remained unchanged; and in any case the metropolis has the added attraction that, through what it has become, one can look back with nostalgia at what it was.
This really speaks to all nostalgia, doesn’t it?
Related, from Fedora:
On the map of your empire, O Great Khan, there must be room both for the big, stone Fedora and the little Fedoras in glass globes. Not because they are all equally real, but because all are only assumptions. The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer.
Another one, from the opening of another chapter.
“It has neither name nor place. I shall repeat the reason why I was describing it to you: from the number of imaginable cities we must exclude those whose elements are assembled without a connecting thread, an inner rule, a perspective, a discourse. 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 reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”
This really is a profound insight into societies, which are at their core made of desires and fears which drive behavior.
This line from “Chloe” ties in as well.
If men and women began to live their ephemeral dreams, every phantom would become a person with whom to begin a story of pursuits, pretenses, misunderstandings, clashes, oppressions, and the carousel of fantasies would stop.
The discussion of empires continues in the framing sections of the chapters. Here is another great line from Polo.
“Yes, the empire is sick, and, what is worse, it is trying to become accustomed to its sores. This is the aim of my explorations: examining the traces of happiness still to be glimpsed, I gauge its short supply. If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.”
One of the best examples of the duality of cities (and humans) is this one:
The city of Sophronia is made up of two half-cities. In one there is the great roller coaster with its steep humps, the carousel with its chain spokes, the Ferris wheel of spinning cages, the death-ride with crouching motorcyclists, the big top with the clump of trapezes hanging in the middle. The other half-city is of stone and marble and cement, with the bank, the factories, the palaces, the slaughterhouse, the school, and all the rest. One of the half-cities is permanent, the other is temporary, and when the period of its sojourn is over, they uproot it, dismantle it, and take it off, transplanting it to the vacant lots of another half-city.
And so every year the day comes when the workmen remove the marble pediments, lower the stone walls, the cement pylons, take down the Ministry, the monument, the docks, the petroleum refinery, the hospital, load them on trailers, to follow from stand to stand their annual itinerary.
All too often, what we assume is permanent is actually the most temporary.
In the close of that chapter, Polo describes to approaches to thinking of cities. I found this fascinating, and applicable in a way to understanding humanity and culture as well.
“From now on, I’ll describe the cities to you,” the Khan had said, “in your journeys you will see if they exist.”
But the cities visited by Marco Polo were always different from those thought of by the emperor.
“And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced,” Kublai said. “It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations.”
“I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others,” Marco answered. “It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real.”
What is “normal”? What is “the norm”? Is it just another way of saying “majority,” or, as is more common when dealing with humans, is it just “whatever I prefer”?
And then, there is one of the most famous lines in the book, but one that I think is good.
“There is still one of which you never speak.”
Marco Polo bowed his head.
“Venice,” the Khan said.
Marco smiled. “What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?”
The emperor did not turn a hair. “And yet I have never heard you mention that name.”
And Polo said: “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.”
Another line, from “Adelma”:
I thought: “You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.”
And another one from near the end:
“It is not the voice that commands the story, it is the ear.”
I can’t forget this one from “Perinthia,” which reminds me so much of the authoritarian parenting gurus my parents followed - many of which are completely estranged from their kids and grandchildren now. The city is laid out as the astronomers direct, to put everything in perfect harmony with the heavens and the gods.
But, like any city, it fails to meet the standard of perfection. In this case, the city seems to produce more than its share of disabled, insane, and otherwise “not normal” people.
Perinthia’s astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters.
I’ll end with the ending of the book, which I think is amazing. After this lengthy tour of the complexity of cities, society, and human nature itself, Khan wonders if there is any hope?
He said: “It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.”
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 in 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.”
It’s pretty hard to beat that as a way of wrapping up such a philosophical discussion by way of metaphor.
As with any book in translation, it is impossible to entirely separate the work of the author from the work of the translator. The English version of this book was translated by William Weaver, and I found the prose to be highly poetic and beautiful.
I am now curious to read more of Calvino - he is described as a “postmodernist” writer, and, if this book is any indication, he uses unconventional forms and ways of telling his story. I liked this one, so perhaps the others will be interesting as well.
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