Invisible Cities

So; Invisible Cities.  I didn’t love it.  I don’t love Italo Calvino.  Years ago I had to study If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller as part of the first year of my degree.  I was nineteen and totally didn’t get it.  It’s written too much in the second person and it seems to go somewhere and then doesn’t- or goes in an entirely different direction after having quite a promising opening.  In all honesty, I don’t remember the ins and outs of it that well; I just remember not enjoying it.  Like, seriously not enjoying it, to the point that I haven’t even thought of cracking open another of Calvino’s works for almost seven years; there’s a reason he never actually won the Nobel Prize after all.

There isn’t really a plot.  Marco Polo describes various cities to Kublai Khan.  It’s probably quite a lot like that Netflix series about Marco Polo, except the pilot of that bored me something chronic too, so I never got any further.  Anyway, Calvino’s Marco Polo is actually describing Venice.  All the cities are Venice.  Literally nothing else happens.   Marco Polo and Kublai Khan chat a bit, but as it’s established fairly early on in the book that they don’t speak the same language, I’m a tad confused as to how this happens.  Maybe they’re just speaking their own languages but louder and more slowly, we’ll never really know.

It’s frustrating that I didn’t enjoy this book.  As I mentioned, part of it is concerned with the language barrier between the two characters and there’s a strong implication that Khan’s inferences don’t match Polo’s intent.  This should be fascinating given that I was, of course, reading a translated version which is bound to have changed so many of those details that only appear to be minor.  But, as I’ve mentioned, I didn’t enjoy Invisible Cities and found it generally pretty hard to care.  Calvino also peppers the entire thing with (I assume) deliberate anachronisms.  Again, Calvino probably had some clever intent for these, but by the time I reached them I wasn’t invested enough to care. 

Part of the reason that I didn’t like it was the plot, or lack therefore of.  Polo spends his time describing cities to Khan.  That is all that happens.  Each city is a short vignette (usually no more than a page of so) that is sometimes thematically linked to another city.  I ended up just thinking that most of the cities are impractical up until the point of impossibility.  There is one, Armilla, that has no walls, or floors; only water pipes.  I’m just going to let that sit for a moment.  I designed (and later destroyed with aliens and tornados) better places on Sim City when I was a child.  Things like that make me think Calvino was aiming for whimsy and hitting really fucking stupid. 

This isn’t a book I wildly enjoyed.  Luckily it’s a short one.  The most frustrating part is the fact that the entire book can be summed up in a one page conversation between Polo and Khan.  Polo is describing a bridge by each of its stones.  Khan insists that he doesn’t want to hear about each of the stones, only the bridge and its arch.  Naturally, Polo’s enigmatic reply is, “The bridge is not supported by one stone or another… but by the line of the arch they form… Without the stones there is no arch.”  Without the vignettes about Venice, there is no Venice.  It’s the best part of the book.

I’m now reading Waterland by Graham Swift.