Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities

Jeanette Winterson (some of you may remember her – she wrote that book about fruit) once wrote that Invisible Cities by Italian writer, Italo Calvino, is the ‘book I would choose as pillow and plate, alone on a desert island’, and while I wouldn’t recommend eating off this book (it’s quite small) or using it to rest your head upon (again, it’s quite small – and hard), I would definitely recommend reading it.

Published in 1972, the novel takes the form of a conversation between the 13^th century explorer Marco Polo and the Chinese emperor Kublai Khan (also immortalised in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s virtually indecipherable, opium-fuelled poem Kubla Khan, but that’s another story), during which Marco Polo describes a number of cities he has supposedly visited on his travels. These descriptions become increasingly imaginative and imaginary as the novel progresses. For example, take this description of the city of Argia:

What makes Argia different from other cities is that it has earth instead of air. The streets are completely filled with dirt, clay packs the rooms to the ceiling…We do not know if the inhabitants can move about the city, widening the worm tunnels and the crevices where roots twist…everyone is better off remaining still, prone; anyway it is dark.

From up here, nothing of Argia can be seen; some say, “It’s down below there,” and we can only believe them…At night, putting your ear to the ground, you can sometimes hear a door slam.

Or this one of Eutropia:

On the day when Eutropia’s inhabitants feel the grip of weariness and no one can bear any longer his job, his relatives, his house and his life, debts, the people he must greet or who greet him, then the whole citizenry decides to move to the next city, which is there waiting for them, empty and good as new; there each will take up a new job, a different wife, will see another landscape on opening his window, and will spend his time with different pastimes, friends, gossip.

Calvino’s fictional Polo goes on to describe a city built on a cosmic plan, a city built on stilts, a city that never ends, a city constructed entirely of water pipes, a city divided between the living and the dead, a city divided between work and play, and many more (including Octavia, ‘the spider-web city’). In these descriptions history, fantasy and reality are inextricably intermingled; they are, in the words of Kublai Khan, ‘consolatory fables’.

This is the second novel by Calvino that I have read (the other being If on a winter’s night a traveller – which consists of the opening chapters of ten different novels!) and there are definite similarities between the two books. Both are incredibly original, imaginative and inventive, and both dispense with a traditional narrative structure in favour of an episodic approach with the different elements of the novel held together by the themes and ideas that Calvino is exploring. In the case of Invisible Cities, it seems to me that it is the nature of cities and the importance of travel and consequently of home that is being explored; Polo has travelled extensively across the world, but it is his home, Venice which seems to be always on his mind as he tells Khan that ‘Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.’ It is the schizophrenic nature of cities, in all their multifarious splendour that interests Calvino (as well as Polo, Khan and the reader); it is their duality, their insatiability, their unlimited capacity for expansion, their horror and their delight.

Cities, Polo contends, are the ‘inferno of the living…the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together.’ What could be a more appropriate description of London in 2013? There are, Polo tells Khan, ‘two ways to escape suffering it’, but you’ll have to read the book to find out!

Mr R.