Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

From there I revisited Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972, English language translation 1974 by William Weaver). Calvino writes in Marco Polo’s voice as he relates stories to Kublai Khan about cities in his vast empire across the globe. Why am I relating this book to you? Because you are a reader every bit as much as Khan was a conqueror. Books are your kingdom, and though you may not have ever visited Invisible Cities before, it is there waiting for you.

The book is arranged mathematically so that in 55 separate sections Marco Polo relates a type of city five times. That makes for eleven city types. These sections are divided into larger blocks of nine, with ten sections in the first and ninth blocks, and five sections in the remaining blocks of two through eight. Framing each block are interstitial passages rendered in italics which narrate the interactions between Marco and the Great Khan. These interstitial passages loosely form an overarching story that ties all of the sections together into one narrative whole of Marco’s travels and the expression of wonders in Kublai’s empire (also the world at large).

I have heard the tales of other travelers to Invisible Cities. They—who say it is a monument to postmodern literature, or that it is a wondrous artifact of magical realism—would be the same to point to Ulysses as the greatest novel of the 20^th century, or to The Coast of Chicago as a collection of dreamlike landscapes. Which is to say nothing of the value of the book itself, what it provides to its citizens in the way of sustenance, inspiration, direction, or shelter. Invisible Cities is a book that is designed to show you how it can be read and how to read other books, all books, as well.

During my visit this time I found a section within Invisible Cities titled “Invisible Cities.” It was not a section I recalled reading before, and in truth if you pick up a copy right now it won’t be in the table of contents nor will you happen upon it suddenly flipping through the page headings. As the title suggests, it’s invisible, and can only be discerned indirectly. Nothing is truly invisible, but it can be difficult to recognize unless you look for the distortion, the particular bend in the refraction of light that tells you something is there even though you cannot see it.

In this hidden section I saw not Venice, not the fanciful descriptions of cities made of water pipes or maps arranged like stellar constellations. No, I saw the city that was made of words, the buildings standing on the foundation of ideas. I saw myself as a resident of this city, not only buying my groceries and driving down its streets, but changing the landscape and building a new school. We are not all academics or English majors, but we are all students of literature. Walking the alleys and byways of Invisible Cities is like opening a single book to find a great library within.