Invisible Cities in On Paths Unknown

Oct 12, 2012 Jonathan rated it it was amazing

Shelves: worshiped-and-adored, the-top-ten, signed-and-or-first-editions, favorites

One of my favourite books, read and re-read many times.

****

Joseph Mcelroy's review from the New York Times, 1974 (transcription errors obviously mine - tried to do what I could):

"Invisible Cities" is a new book by Italy's most original storyteller, Italo Calvino. But this time not a book of stories. Something more.
In "Cosmicomics" Calvino found a way to make fables out of evolution. The fables emerged like elemental anecdotes from opening hypotheses, and the biology, the physics, the astronomy One of my favourite books, read and re-read many times.

****

Joseph Mcelroy's review from the New York Times, 1974 (transcription errors obviously mine - tried to do what I could):

"Invisible Cities" is a new book by Italy's most original storyteller, Italo Calvino. But this time not a book of stories. Something more.
In "Cosmicomics" Calvino found a way to make fables out of evolution. The fables emerged like elemental anecdotes from opening hypotheses, and the biology, the physics, the astronomy, were much more knowledgeable than Calvino the entertainer let them seem. But in "t zero" (which in my opinion was one of the most important works of fiction published during the sixties), Calvino accepted his scientific subject matter less whimsically. He deepened and complicated his vision
and voices. He moved into mathematics. He imagined what it might feel like when a one-celled self divides.
In his earlier historical romances that theme of growth had been seen through a kind of uncertain satirical fancy. A young baron takes to the trees in protest against society, and stays there to become an arboreal amphibian, a rebel mutant. A young viscount goes away to war only to be blown apart; his nasty half returns home like some subversion of himself but at long last is rejoined to his long lost good half.
Recently, in "Smog" and in two of the "t zero" stories, Calvino has turned the precise play of his mind upon separations and isolations in urban life. And now, in "Invisible Cities," he has transmuted his themes into something new.
The wonderful phenomena of "Invisible Cities" are seen as through some unfolding nuclear kaleidoscope. Past and future possibility grow out of the prison of an "unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new
forms they may assume."
These words-in William Weaver's beautifully seductive translation-are spoken by an imaginary Kublai Khan, old and pessimistic, for one of the book's two interleaved narratives is his curious, elegiac conversation with his employee, the Venetian traveller Marco Polo. The second narrative-which fills the book's main spaces and makes it not so much a parody of the 13th-century "Travels" as an alternative meditation-is what Marco brings the Khan: an account of fifty-odd cities Marco has visited. Thin cities, double cities, cities suspended-cities, despite Calvino's title, exactly and fascinatingly visible-cities such as Hypatia, in whose lagoons crabs bite the eyes of suicides; or Thekla, where new building never stops lest destruction begin: or three-fold Beersheba projecting celestial jewel-like self above, and base city of cheese rinds and fish scales below, but officially ignoring its "only free and happy action," defecating.
Why does the emperor ask the traveler to tell him what is in his empire? Partly because the emperor cannot know what is in it. Perhaps because he may wish not to know, but also because he must wish to feel in its deterioration some chance of growth.
Calvino's twin narratives lean toward and away from each other. The cities, for all their distilled form, represent Mass. The intermittent conversation between the Khan and Marco Polo is Form; it is the will to simplify; it is also a dialogue between the imperial will to impose and possess and the power to rest in the contemplation of multiplicity. At first, the Khan finds in Marco's accounts "a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing." Then, as the two men talk, cities come to seem "consolatory fables," states of mind, phantasms.
Yet in the main narrative these cities have the glint of substance; they are alluring, disturbing and distinct as if possessed of the significance of a Kafka parable.
On the other hand, though each city has its special quality, Calvino's gazetteer is elusive, for it embraces perverse paradoxes and sequences within sequences. We are warned not to confuse cities with the words used to describe them; yet we are told that falsehood is not in words but in things. Cities of Signs touch Cities of Memory.
The voluptuous Trading City Chloe, where strangers (like figures out of RobbeGrillet's "La Maison des Rendezvous") consummate strange intimacies in silence, may remind us of that Hid en City of sadness, Raissa, "where runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another ... unravels ... draws new patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence."
Calvino's elusiveness comes also from the honesty with which he develops his series. "Invisible Cities" is an elegy, autumnal and melancholy. Cities do move more and more toward failure, and toward the end of the book Procopia, the last of the "Continuous Cities," is so crowded that the people hide the place and even the sky.
And there is Penthesilea, less an "aggregation of opaque polyhedrons on the horizon" than a limbo of endless outskirts. But the reader finds something more interesting here than decline and fall. Even the cities that exhibit delusion and degeneration remain the possibilities from which, as Marco tells the Khan, any crystal-perfect community whose molecular form the Khan dreams of must in part be calculated.
In Laudamia death seems a function of ignorance, yet they are subtly balanced by the strict and close attention Calvino's lens draws from us. If Perinthia, like some old rational Utopia designed to reflect the pattern of the heavens, is, doomed, Calvino has yet more complex appreciations of order to offer us. In Andria, whose layout and calendar reflect the firmament, alterations nonetheless occur all the time and "any, change in Andria involves some novelty in the stars." And since "every innovation in the city influences the sky's pattern," the Andrians must think of the consequences "for all worlds." And then at last we reach what seems almost to be the secret center of Calvino's vision: Berenice, where the just city grows within the unjust city but will itself become unjust in its time as surely as it its [illegible]
Still, Babylon and Yahooland will not go away. And the Khan's great atlas unveils shapeless networks of the future-Los Angeles, Kyoto-Osaka. Yet then I remember those closing stories of "t zero" in which the mind makes new space within patterns of imprisonment, and does so in speculations that accept analysis and technology not simply as the enemy but as models and targets of intense and vital attention. For I believe it is some such space that Calvino has created for his archetypal communities.
If they are forms, they are also like signals condensing in themselves power that awaits its translation into form. And Calvino's book is like no other I know. ...more

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Jul 04, 2010 Arun Divakar rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

For once, just for this once I agree with a review on the book cover. On the cover page of Invisible Cities is written a line by Sunday Times " A subtle, beautiful meditation..", the book lives up to these words in its 165 pages. This is my first Italo Calvino and I intend to find out from some place his acclaimed "If on a winter's night..".

Unfolding as a dialog between the Chinese Emperor Kublai Khan & the legendary explorer Marco Polo, the book is a dream like sojourn through a distant land( o For once, just for this once I agree with a review on the book cover. On the cover page of Invisible Cities is written a line by Sunday Times " A subtle, beautiful meditation..", the book lives up to these words in its 165 pages. This is my first Italo Calvino and I intend to find out from some place his acclaimed "If on a winter's night..".

Unfolding as a dialog between the Chinese Emperor Kublai Khan & the legendary explorer Marco Polo, the book is a dream like sojourn through a distant land( or should i say dream !)scapes. When the book began, I was trying to make sense of the names of the cities as Marco described them but then somewhere along the flow of the book the names of the cities did not matter. At some points it is the travel to reach the city that matters, at others it could be a street in the city that holds your attention & at other times it could be the glimpse of a face at the window if just for a second ; these are the remembrances the book left me with.

The cities that Marco Polo describes to the Emperor all maybe begin and end with the narrator's home : Venice. It is from a subtly vague remembrance of Venice that Marco might begin describing a tale. From this might branch the alleys, by lanes and streets of a distant city. Whether the city might be a dream or reality is something that is hinted in the book at many a place. The traveler takes the emperor through many a facet of the cities : through resplendent glory & Opulence to death & decay ; through cities built within cities & alternate realities to crumbling dust of once glorious townships & mazes of cities from which there is no return. Keeping Polo's descriptions aside, the insightful dialog that passes between the two are wonderful to say the least. One of those books where I never skipped through pages...there were too few to skip any way !!!

Recommended to all those who would want a dreamy journey through imaginary landscapes of beauty & grace...

One of those wonderful lines in the book as said by Marco Polo when asked to describe Venice by the emperor : Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased. Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little. ...more

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Dec 21, 2008 Nate D rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 70s-delerium, post-modernism, read-in-2009, italy

After four days travel by camel beyond the pass, the you will reach the city of Italo, whose minarets and spires leap at the sun from a series of distinct but overlapping architectural clusters. The city's many libraries, dispersed among the towers, not only house the blueprints for all conceivable settlements, but walking the streets to find them, you will find yourself presented with puzzles and mazes that gradually alter your redirect your thinking, your ways of seeing. And when you leave, yo ...more

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Apr 15, 2024 Kamakana rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: aa-italylit, literature, pomo, xshort-less-200, fantasy, read-twice-or-more, translation, aa-europelit, calvino-italo, experimental

if you like this review i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com

240415: how could I have ever given this less than five. first read three-plus decades ago. this is exactly what I want, now. combination essay/fiction/philosophy. having read so many more books (probably 4 000+), certainly more philosophy ( 700?), more years, more experiences... feel more than confident in rating this five. it is so embedded in my memory that there is trouble remembering when I had not yet read this. there are b ...more

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