![]() It is a book about cities: Diomira, Isidora, Despina, Dorothea, Zirma, Anastasia, Fedora, Eutropia (Europe + entropy?), and many others. “But what is Calvino’s book about?” You may ask. However, you do not need to know – or even suspect the existence of – any rules to enjoy the book, just as you do not need to know anything about architecture to experience a city. Most probably, there is a set of rules according to which the book has been written – after all, Calvino belonged to Oulipo (Ouvroir de litérature potentielle, Workshop of potential literature), a gathering of authors interested in the effects of applying mathematically strict rules to the process of writing. The spell of this hallucination is often so strong that you feel you are reading the most beautiful book ever written: you lose yourself in it as in a labyrinth, but when you have found your way again, you realise that there must be a secret mechanism governing it all – there is something suspicious about the repetitions, the anachronisms (skyscrapers and motorcycles in the 13th century?). Yet Calvino, contrary to Coleridge, achieves this dream quality by stripping down his language to bare essentials, a stylistic feature that he admired in Kafka, who, according to him, was “using a language so transparent that it reaches a hallucinatory level” (an interview with Alexander Stille, Saturday Review, March/April 1985). A fragment”) – the latter reference is the more relevant as the book, like Coleridge’s lyric, often has the quality of a dream or a drug-induced vision (and the two characters indeed smoke opium). The meeting, and the telling of the stories, bring to mind The Arabian Nights, and the name of Kublai Khan evokes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan (which carries the subtitle “Or, a vision in a dream. As Calvino puts it: “It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear”. But perhaps what really counts is the reader, the real addressee of the stories. The narrator and the listener are not flesh-and-blood men they are nebulous, elusive. The two did really meet (in Beijing, in 1266), but the reader quickly realises that historical facts are just a pretext for Calvino’s story. Literally, the book tells the story of the meeting between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan during which Polo describes to the curious Khan the cities that he had seen during his voyages. “When the camel driver sees, at the horizon of the tableland, the pinnacles of the skyscrapers come into view, the radar antennae, the white and red wind-socks flapping, the chimneys belching smoke, he thinks of a ship he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off, with the breeze already swelling the sails, not yet unfurled, or a steamboat with its boiler vibrating in the iron keel and he thinks of all the ports, the foreign merchandise the cranes unload on the docks, the taverns where crews of different flags break bottles over one another’s heads, the lighted, ground-floor windows, each with a woman combing her hair.” It is impossible to summarise it: in order to give the potential reader an idea about the book, one should quote a passage, yet it seems that no fragment can represent the whole (nevertheless, we must quote a passage anyway): Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972) is a book teeming with paradoxes: it is prose, but feels like poetry it is very erudite, you feel the author has swallowed a whole library, and you can hear echoes of other works, yet it possesses an astonishing lightness it is repetitive, yet it feels strangely fresh, indeed so dangerously alluring that you want to read it very slowly, in order not to finish it too quickly, not to overdose, as it is like a drug.
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