Invisible Cities (edit title)

• Rated 5 stars

““The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the actors changed.” (64)

It’s not unusual for me to do background study on an author new to me—admittedly (and regrettably) I’d never read Calvino before now—but in this case I felt I needed to know Calvino to be able to proceed. Putting his face into my head helped with the journey ahead. The reason—I felt a great many things about this narrative in the early pages that I didn’t believe I was absorbing on a surface level. In other words, me=impatient. Retrospectively I understand the absorption I craved may, may, may have come in a shorter time than my anxiety allowed me to suspect, that the intrinsic sensations of discomfort represented the manifestations of my efforts to figure out patterns I knew were there, but couldn’t see.

I like to nail things early and move on.

Amid the hypnotic beauty of the phrase and within the wondrous journey from one city to the next revolved a merry-go-round, circling slowly enough that I could easily jump on. But I felt, sensed, when it circled around again, in place of the horse was some other thing I’d never seen, followed then by the horse. And around and around and each time a bench or a clown in the place of the horse or the bench, followed by the rest of the familiar scene. Each revolution rendered the previous view, the pattern I’d gleaned, slightly off, so slightly that I doubted my own memory of the last turn.
“…the traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed…” (28)

Insanity!

The brain naturally wants to bring order to patterns. To ward off the sucking sound of here comes a platitude, I ask permission to state the obvious with the aid of a sidebar.

(Sidebar: My entire life I’ve seen sounds as colors—I’m not talking simple flashes, but more like transference of complex sounds into equally complex, and moving, color patterns. A symphony takes form and shape, colors jumping and careening in their paths, acting inside or defying their own patterns, their sense defined (or ill-defined) by their motion within the larger body. I liken it to watching a color-enhanced satellite image of a hurricane, or one of those dancing visual images that pops up on some computer audio players. Because I never found cause to think this unusual, I only recently openly discussed it for the first time, completely in passing, with a professional musician. I heard it called by name: Synesthesia.
(Sidebar within a Sidebar: A mite bit of research led me to one Dr. Sean Day, who holds a position at Trident Technical College in South Carolina, but more notably is a synesthete who serves as president of the American Synesthesia Association. A journalist, one Ormie Day, once told me that the Day bloodline is fairly confined and that we’re all related).
The point—my natural ability to see order and flow in color patterns begins and ends with sound. But something, some facet of Invisible Cities bore down on me like a piece of music I couldn’t see. It ate at me from the inside. Insanity!

So I manually broke it into a color pattern.

I thought seeing it this way would make the patterns clear. Chapters 2 through 8 function like funhouse stairs, shifting (to all intents and purposes) right at each level, tossing the edgemost item off into the ether and picking up a new starter at the head of the line. Call back the image of the slightly shifting merry-go-round.

That makes sense up to a point.

The at-first-glance haphazard patterns of Chapters 1 and 9 then began to show their own order. I’d just begun to comprehend this as not at all a linear matrix, when my other half, the physicist, walked in with dinner from Dihn’s. “I want to show you something,” I told him. “From what I’m seeing, Chapter 9 is the inverse of Chapter 1.” He took out a pen and paper, asked me to read the colors from Chapter 1 in order, then the colors from Chapter 9 in reverse order. Then he assigned numbers to each color. Same numbers, same pattern. “I bet the rest of the chapters run through inverse order,” I said, willing to leave it to assumption. But while I ate my wonton soup, Art took the entire pattern scheme through the steps, working inward, Chapters 2 and 8, 3 and 7, and so on. Same mirror image, same inverse pattern, converging with Chapter 5.

And by assigning positive and negative numbers to the colors, Art determined that the book adds up to sum zero. “It cancels itself out,” I said, again stating the obvious.

My mind raced.

I looked upon the grid with a bird’s eye, performed a mental animation, transformed it into a three-dimensional figure, assigning not only a color but a different height to each. I swooped down, stood at the base as if walking into my old neighborhood in Chicago, and a (seemingly) random cityscape rose up before me.

Art played further with the same numbers, digging for deeper patterns, eventually needing to get back to his own work. But before he retreated to his own realm, he asked if I’d send the grid to him. He wants to show it to some people in the math department.

I imagined twisting the pattern like the double helix, with the center of stability on Chapter 5.
“…the jam of past, present, future that blocks existences calcified in the illusion of movement…” (99)

Insanity!

I feel I could continue on, twisting and warping this grid, into a diamond, an orb, a dodecahedron…
“Whatever country my words may evoke around you, you will see it from such a vantage point.” (27)
…but I get the sense that it will always, always make sense of itself. It will always cancel itself out.

One thing for sure. I’ll never look at any city the same way again.”

• Rated 4 stars

“This is, among other things and in my opinion, a nice introduction to semiotics and mid-20th century thought. It is very strange, a series of word-pictures each the length of a chapter describing a different, imagined city. Don't expect a narrative line or any sort of suspense. Would go well with a viewing of La Jetee.”

• Rated 2 stars

“I read Chapter 1 of this book. And then I had to backtrack. I decided to read all bookends of every chapter instead. These contain imaginary conversations between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. This book is very well written. The several variations on the theme of the city are perfect exercises for a powerful writer. It should have been marketed as poetry and not fiction, as each snippet can be considered a prose poem. I decided to forgo reading the rest of it. There's no doubt that Italo Calvino writes beautifully. But in this case, beauty is its own weakness. You will be fed up by the painful beauty of the writing.”

• Rated 0 stars

“...c'est la poesie :)

This is poetry indeed. disguised in the sober garb of prose.

But so much the lovelier for all its dreaminess and sets-you-floating feel...discovering along with his words is living the poetry! :)”

• Rated 2 stars

“"You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours."

I have heard of the term literary masturbation a few times before but I never really understood it until I read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Maybe this is what people refer to when they say “writing for writing’s sake.”

Beautiful, melodic prose. Wonderful weaving of words. A melee of metaphysical metaphors. Dizzying, dazzling details. Vivid imagery. Descriptions beyond the ordinary man’s ability to describe. Magical. Moving. But sadly, all these leaving me scratching my head thinking, what the fafaya is this guy talking about? Reading it, I had the feeling that someone somewhere is enjoying all these. But I’m not part of the fun. Hence, now I get what literary masturbation looks and uhm, feels like.

"The city that they speak of has much of what it needed to exist, whereas the city that exists on it site, exists less."

In this novel, if you could call it that, the very thin and loose plot revolves around the conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Some exchanges are amusing. Silly, even. But mostly, it is about the cities. About the most fantastic ways anyone can ever describe cities.

The invisible cities Calvino talks about is really just one city: Venice. But he describes Venice in the most interesting, peculiar, perplexing of ways. He never calls Venice Venice. Instead he assigns dozens of exotic names. Each name presents a different aspect of the city. He describes the city through its architecture and structures; through its culture; its inhabitants – dead, alive, imaginary, human or otherwise; through objects, mundane or extraordinary; through its daily activities of commerce and human drama; through nature and its elements; through demarcation lines distinct or blurred; through dreams; through entrances and exits; through myths; through events; through seasons; through its pathways. If there is a way of describing a city, Calvino has used it.

"Not the labile mists of memory nor the dry transperence, but the charring of burned lives that forms a scab on the city, the sponge swollen with vital matter that no longer flows. the jam of past, present, future that blocks existence calcified in the illusion of movement: this is what you would feel at the end of your journey."

Eventually, I warmed up to the story by the sheer beauty of language. By the time I got to the end, I felt like I had traveled a thousand miles, but still scratching my head with an ending as vague and confounding as the whole story itself. I still didn’t get it, but it sure was an amazing ride. To paraphrase a line from the book, "I regret having to leave the city when I barely graze it with my glance."”

• Rated 4 stars

“Very strange by very beautiful. Highly recommended.”

• Rated 2 stars

“Series of brief prose poems of imaginary places full of mood, some striking images.”

• Rated 4 stars

“It's all familiar, all completely new. 'At times the mirror increases a thing's value, at times denies it. Not everything that seems valuable above the mirror maintains its force when mirrored.'”