Author of invisible cities11/9/2023 ![]() ![]() (1) Frame: The two very distinct types of material in Invisible Cities – the city descriptions and the conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan – create the effect of a kind of scaffolding wrapping itself around the main body of the book. What can novella-in-flash writers learn from this book? Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, along with the recurring pattern of city descriptions, provide the necessary “thread” for it all to hang together. We are left with a novella that feels like it has rejected “plot”. The main material reads more like a miscellaneous anthology. Only within the “frame” material (the conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan) could there be said to be any progression, as their relationship changes subtly. This book is the epitome of what can be called the “novella-as-collection” – in the main body of the book (the descriptions of the cities), there isn’t really a developing narrative situation – it is more like a series of portraits, individually dynamic but lacking a collective forward movement. A recurring narrative ‘frame’ (conversational interludes between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan) introduces a political context for the city descriptions, and queries the meanings of these cities and their relationship to Kublai Khan’s empire. It’s not a book that can be read quickly. ![]() The dense, highly descriptive chapters read almost like prose poems. The detailed, technical focus of Calvino’s world-building can be related to both dystopian speculative fiction and travel writing, and there’s a definite philosophical edge. Each category is gradually introduced through an alternating, spiraling mathematical pattern. Structure/Style: The city descriptions are grouped into eleven categories: Cities & Memory, Cities & Desire, Cities & Signs, Thin Cities, Trading Cities, Cities & the Dead, etc, and there are 5 cities in each category. Ultimately, all these invisible cities speak to a single, imagined location – as Marco Polo puts it: ‘Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice’. The cities all have notably feminised names (Irene, Clarice, Phyllis, Laudomia, Beersheba, etc), which implicitly contrasts with the masculine identity of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, but the reason for this is not made explicit. Twinned, doubled, split and shadowed cities feature repeatedly: if these cities resemble characters, they feel like late 20th century, post-Freudian representations of existence. Wild, untameable forces compete against forces of order and benign structure. Each city expresses a distinct way of living, and even could be said to resemble a state of mind. The cities are generally uncanny or unhomely : for example, a city that expels all its waste on a daily basis into its outskirts, such that it is threatened with landslide a city on stilts where everyone refuses to touch the ground a city whose construction is never complete a city with a parallel city of its dead citizens living alongside it. Subject Matter: Marco Polo describes 55 fictitious cities to the emperor Kublai Khan. It is an innovative story that has been profoundly influential in literary, architectural and many other creative fields, and consequently Invisible Cities is considered a remarkable and masterful book.Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino (1972 London: Vintage, 1997), pp.148 Invisible Cities gives way to a collection of bizarre, beautiful, horrible and terrifying cities - although at times strangely familiar and other times terrifically impossible. These various encounters, the constructions of imagined cities, are filled with persuasive imagery, rich in architectural form and offer suggestive in cultural and social metaphors as a comment on the nature of our perceptions and rituals. Unbeknown to Khan, Polo is describing, over and over again, the myriad of invented forms of Venice - the very city they both dwell in. Italo Calvino uses sublime prose to evoke the extraordinary and yet illusory endeavours of a young Marco Polo, who describes to the Kublai Khan, the exotic and global encounters he pretends to have witnessed. Victoria writes: Invisible Cities is a brilliant novel about the dominance of imagination, the lust of desire, the power of the Other and the evocative nature of 'story'. ![]()
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