Un-novelness

I did not care much for Invisible Cities and it’s “un-novelness.” I do admire this book for its fascinating structure in and of itself. The fact that different categories of stories and cities travel up and down in number sequence and are then replaced by others is very intriguing. All the cities seem to have the names of women as well. I think what kept me fascinated were the conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Kahn about their different viewpoints of the cities, eventually questioning even their existence outside of each of their imaginations. But this book was still cold. There are many reasons to admire it, but I could not love it. Its form was an experiment that did not connect with its language to create a story. That was troubling.

On the outside, Invisible Cities is simply a dialogue between the Emperor Kublai Khan and the explorer, Marco Polo. Polo describes his cities physically or imaginatively. But through the progression of Polo’s stories, Khan is unsure of Polo and the truth about all these cities he has traveled to. I developed suspicion as well as the descriptions become more dense. The descriptions themselves are brilliantly written and organized between Polo and Khan opening and closing each section as to frame the different cities. It’s interesting how the city descriptions are tied loosely together by their repeating titles. But I still did not feel free to read the novel in any order I please.

The questions Calvino imposed made you really wonder what his point was in writing this novel. He explores the idea of the cities but then we take personal experiences and our own interactions with our environment to decide if we created the cities or if they created us. Going along with the same idea, I think the cities represent different aspects of ourselves. Calvino toys with experiences like fear of death, love, weakness, and longing. The novel as a whole probes at broader ideas like truth and permanence.

This was not a novel that I could not dive into all at once. Sometimes I found myself doing just that, which is why I’m not surprised I found the text confusing. Its beauty is better revealed when the story is slowly unraveled with time to think and, most importantly, understand the specific ideas and imagery Calvino expresses.