![]() Each one with a distinct personality (though sharing several commonalities), each one carrying a female name, each one constructed in a surrealist way that defies time and space. In a way, the true characters of Invisible Cities are the cities themselves. No, there are no other characters, not really. Neither Marco Polo nor Kublai Khan are the main characters of the novel. In narrative terms, the novel is about imagination and creativity, reality and identity (though in a rather general, abstract way), and – particularly – the way we create assumptions.Īnd so, with this in mind, let’s talk about characters – so that I can dispel one such assumption. You see, as I often say, literature is more than a sum of its parts, and no other book I’ve read recently portrays this more skillfully than Calvino’s novel. The plot doesn’t matter either, and I’m delighted I need just one sentence to describe what the book is about: Marco Polo and Kublai Khan discuss the various cities the former has visited. Ridiculously, Amazon lumps it with such categories as “Classic Action & Adventure”, “Biographical Historical Fiction”, and even “Historical Italian Fiction”, which are only some of the categories Invisible Cities amusingly deconstructs. We could call it experimental fiction, surrealist, postmodern, it doesn’t matter. ![]() Invisible Cities is a book that defies categorization Review of Invisible Cities: Genre, Plot, Narrative And so, in this review of Invisible Cities my goal – as with everything else I review – is ultimately to show you what the book feels like, rather than what it is. But reviews aren’t about what we like, but about why we like them. With these in mind, it will likely be no surprise to hear that I loved Calvino’s book. It’s what art should really be like: Focusing on affect, foregoing plot. Invisible Cities defies characterization. In that review, too, I had real trouble placing the work in a certain framework. If that way of describing it sounds familiar, you’ve likely read my review of Confessions of a Mask, by Yukio Mishima. To amend this, listen to Polo’s observation, “it is not the voice that commands the story it is the ear.So, what should a review of Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino be like? One thing’s for certain: It can’t be like any other review, because the novel (if one may still call it that) is like no other, either. Within the cohesive empire, the utopian ideal of the cities remains unachieved - whether aimed through the ontological set-up of Plato’s Ideal City in The Republic, or down the centuries, when Calvino sat to write about the cities, which could not be validated. Khan’s aspiration to systematically bracket Polo’s accounts echoes the political realities. At every step, Polo defeats the purpose of the frames and questions its boundaries that refrain him from putting the blocks together. To have a better understanding of Polo’s narration, Khan deploys - chessboard and atlas - as the predetermined tools to lend a structure to Polo’s commentary. Inevitably, it barred me from reading the book under the lens of political empire and sovereign logics. Under the current context, while rereading the text, I was taken by surprise that in the past, I had been caught within the poetic-philosophy framework of the cities. Largely, the text’s liminal position between modern and postmodern forms catches the attention of the readers and critic alike. Even the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge has dedicated a long poem Kubla Khan to the ‘slight disposition’ of the emperor of the Tartars who ruled as far as the regions of current day EuroAsia.Įarly sailing ship for voyages of discovery Image Credit: Courtesy of Creative Commons Even if the cities documented in the book are as fantastical as the Be'er Sheva, the travel accounts of the real-time Italian explorer Marco Polo and Kublai Khan’s court were made popular in the 13th century Italian Renaissance with a travelogue The Travels of Marco Polo written down by Rustichello da Pisa and Polo. The second part holds true for this book - with less than 150 pages it would force you to take long pauses before turning a page and often even moving to the next paragraph to understand the meaning of the unsaid ‘between the lines’. If the cover of the book does not affirm the quality of the book, then the number of pages is nowhere the yardstick to measure the intensity of the read. My first encounter of the bond between these two countries came with the two protagonists - Venetian traveller Marco Polo and the Tartars emperor Kublai Khan - of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, published in 1972. Book cover of Invisible Cities Image Credit: Courtesy of the author
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