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Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” – Book review


“You cry, with regret at having to leave the city when you can barely graze it with your glance” notes Marco Polo, in reference to one of the cities. And this can be said of every other city described in the book. So beautiful, adventurous and enticing that before you read the first ten pages, you are already contemplating an adventurous trip to a dreamy city, one that is unique, one that Calvino himself missed in his dreamy evocations.

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears…” observes Marco Polo in his discourse with Kublai Khan. The book follows Marco Polo, the main protagonist, on his journeys through imaginative cities. Cities are described in the form of a desire, or a desire that formed the city; a traveller who was inspired or an inspiration that the city drew from the traveller to recreate itself so the traveller appreciates it even more. A city that has lost its originality and appears as if it were lost in desolate fears, an identity that has collapsed in dreamy landscapes and impulsive renovations. Another city that preserved its originality at the heart of it, so the people of the city, in their dreams, even today visualise the city as it was hitherto (but some they say dream of city that is not theirs, and one wonders, so where is it?).

Marco Polo describes the old men relapsing in cushions, swaying in hammocks; men and women scurrying through the ruinous deserted streets of a city; how a city greets a traveller coming form the deserts as if it were a ship that would sail away with him to lands that were never known to any man, and the same city greets a traveller coming form the ship as if it were a camel’s saddle embroidered with marble chestnuts.

“Invisible Cities” is inspiring, so imaginative that one wonders if “if on a winter’s night a traveller” (also written by Calvino, published in 1979) was inferior to this book. But, what can I say about the later, it mesmerised me- after my first read, I could not help but think of the world that Calvino toyed with.

With eyes glued to the ceiling and lips clenched over the pipe he was smoking, a traveller in a drugged state leaves a port, into the sea he sails. Saying thus, the great khan orders Marco Polo to scan the coastline and find the city that he has described. To this, the protagonist replies “such a city exists…but I shall not come back to tell you about it. The city exists and it has a simple secret: it knows only departures, not returns”. In describing how an impression on a traveller of a city with magical past can be utter dearth, Marco Polo describes of a city that was a result of all dreamers that had one dream in common- that of a young naked girl running away and the dreamer chasing her through narrow streets with blind turns; high raised walls with mirrors; railed parapets; of shower taps and hinged pipes hung up in mid air with no walls surrounding them. All these dreamers chasing the girl lost sight of her in a blind turn, so they proceeded to build the city of their dreams with the blind turn closed to preclude the naked girl with long hair swishing on her arched back and nubile shoulders from escaping. New comers to the city end up changing the streets with a desire to catch the dream girl and on and on….when a traveller is confronted with the blind turns and dead ends, he bethinks “what an ugly city, a trap”.

“They open alternate mouths in identical yawns” referring to a city, the inhabitant of which switch jobs once in a while and start all over again; another city that appears different form the way you walk, whether with your nose in the trail of whistle that you blow, or with the nail dug into your palms; a city that is repetitive, one that repeats street after street, the same everywhere; “Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Polo continues ”'Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it.”

“It is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which outside” maintains Polo in reply to king Kublai’s predispositions- to claim the cities that Polo described to him. But, the world must sadly be a garbage heap with the king and his servant sifting through the rubbish heaps, scraping metal under piles of flotsam. To this, Polo reminds the emperor of his empire, the hanging garden, situated above the dreary stinking ruins of devastated cities. Thus the comment

The city with beautiful necropolis, where the buried corpses are arranged around dinner tables with dahlias hanging about, corpses of musicians and philosophers around the place….much in comparison to the city upstairs. And the two cities compete with each other in creating passion of exotic grandeur.

The book is full of nuanced observations- people leaning by the rails, women from the floors above lowering baskets suspended to strings….and full of fantasy extolments.

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