Name: Wait, it's all just cities?
Item: Invisible Cities
Author: pharmakos

Invisible Cities →

by Italo Calvino

Wait, it's all just cities?

pharmakos

Mar 12, 2025 9:45 PM

Italo Calvino's invisible cities frames a series of surreal vignettes as a discourse between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Ostensibly, Polo is detailing cities in the Mongol empire that Kublai would be unable to visit due to the practicalities of rule. However, the descriptions aren't of real cities. Each "city" is rather a distillation of a mood or affect one could experience in a city, with fantastical details crystalized around that essence. These images are both no city and on another level, all cities.

Towards the end I started to wonder that maybe cities aren't all that great. How about a little bucolia and rusticorum! But as soon as I thought it Calvino addresses it with the city of Cecilia, where a goat herder wanders for ages trying to get out. "The places have mingled. Cecilia is everywhere. Here, once upon a time, there must have been the Meadow of the Low Sage. My goats recognize the grass on the traffic island."

kunst

9 months ago

I'll give this another chance. I read it rather quickly for a book club that I ended up not attending, and I just found it inscrutable and, to be honest, boring. Didn't get the experience other commenters had at all. Perhaps I read it too much like a real novel rather than like the philosophical prose poem it seems to be.

pharmakos

9 months ago

It's much more a snapshot of vibes than anything like a novel. The characters and plot really just serve as a framing device. I'd liken it to a collection Borges' fictions, less conceptually dense, but connected better thematically.

kunst

9 months ago

Strange. Borges is one of my favorites, which makes me more willing so read this book again.

no_class

9 months ago

Reading this was such a beautiful experience. Bonus points for structuralist overtones (cities being defined by what they aren't, describing Venice by making up all the ways in which a city can differ from it) and other cool ideas like remembering the city layout as if it was a melody. I feel like no matter what I say, I'm still underselling it

lowiqmarkfisher

9 months ago

I love the atmosphere created by this book so much. You feel like the world is suddenly way bigger than it probably is, you feel this surreal limerence for memories that you never had. It's so fantastic.