After sunset, on the terraces of the palace, Marco Polo expounded to the sovereign the results of his missions. As a rule the Great Khan concluded his day savoring these tales with half-closed eyes until his first yawn was the signal for the suite of pages to light the flames that guided the monarch to the Pavilion of August Slumber.But this time Kublai seemed unwilling to give in to the weariness."Tell me another city!" he insisted. With Marco Polo cast in the role of Scheherezade and Kublai Khan as Harun Al Rashid, we embark on an enchanted journey through 1001 cities, seeking to capture their unique essence, their secret identity, their pasts and their futures. The great khan is approaching the end of a glorious career, his wars of conquest finished and his dominion extending to the outer margins of the known world. Now he turns his attention inward in an effort to discover what exactly is his empire composed of. For this purpose, he sends his ambassador Marco Polo to all the corners of the realm, to see and to report back on the geography, the arhitecture, the people, the customs and the history of all the cities he passes through. Based on these stories, Kublai Khan dreams of building the perfect city, the sublimation of all the diversity into a sparkling, diamond like structure that would endure for all ages and will form his legacy for future generations.Marco Polo is in his element here, the born explorer who follows his own siren song to find out what lies beyond the horizon, what precious treasure are hidden behind high city walls, still chasing the dream that sent him away for long years from his beloved Venice. Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have. Why call them invisible since we spend the whole book discussing the visible? Because Italo Calvino entices us to look beyond appearances, beyond the obvious and the trivial if we want to find the secret that makes each city unique and unforgetable. Each of the visited cities is named with a woman's name, a poet's trick that suggests odalisques dancing seductively behind seven diaphanous veils, needing to be caught by surprise, teased or charmed into finally revealing their inner beauty. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. Are the cities described in the book real or fantastic? A figment of Marco Polo's imagination that he feeds piecemeal to Kublai Khan as payment for his sojourn at the court? Or are they actual locations that can still be discovered today by the adventure bound tourist? Readers who are already familiar with Italo Calvino know that the poet loves dissimulation of his purposes, puzzles and daring metaphors, so they would patiently wait for the last veil to be lifted, for the final revelation to be brought to light, for the name of the ultimate city to be uttered.Until then, the casual reader can only relax and enjoy the apparently random postcard like prose poems that link stone with emotion, people with stars, the dead with the living. The atlas of the world that is patiently gathered in these pages is etched with sugestive names, symbolic gestures, sights, smells, songs, desires, dreams, memories, cautionary warnings, "moods, states of grace, elegies" When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls between the bettors. Cities as bastions against wilderness, civilization versus barbarism, art versus plain existence, the eternal versus the transient, structure and order versus chaos - each and every postcard contains within itself dualities of meaning where every affirmation is countered by a negation, every highlight serves to point at the shadows : the city of the dead reflecting the map of the city above, the city on the ground mirroring the dance of the constellations in the night sky. What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howl of the wolves? Read on to learn how one city is like a "butterfly emerging from a beggared chrysalis", another is growing in concentric circles like tree trunks which each year add one more ring, how the city where you arrive for the first time is different from the one you leave never to return, even if they bear the same name. Yet another city is described like a game of chess, or compared to an hourglass which is not turned over, with the unborn citizens waiting patiently their turn in the upper bulb, while the dead are settling at the bottom like geological strata. One city would inspire opposite phantasmes in the eye of the beholder: one sailor gazes upon its's domes and sees camel caravans setting off, while the bedouin glimpses tall white towers like sails departing for far off lands. Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes; and so the camel driver and the sailor see Despina, a border city between two deserts. Calvino is not interested in the cold data of statistics and economic trends, angle of arcades or width of boulevards, dates of revolutions or names of famous leaders. He is after the effect of the city on the psyche of its inhabitants, the subjective translation of desire into the language of stone. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira's past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls. You might be tempted to think that Marco Polo is only spinning tales of long abandoned cities from the past, but I would argue against the theory. Even when talking about histories and ruins and the march of generations, the message is both timeless and timely. The same words would describe any of the cities we are living in today. I found clear references to globalization, corporate monoculture, suburban sprawls, alienation, consumerism and many other woes of the 21st century. Read for yourself and see if you recognize the landscape: In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another: meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping. Ultimately, every city described in the novel is indeed just another faucet of that gemstone Kublai was wishing for - the eternal, universal, 'invisible' heart of the word 'city' as a simbol of civilization. Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice. exclaims at one point Marco Polo. This civilization he sees as heading for dissolution, just like the short-lived empire of Kublai Khan, attacked not so much from without as from its own internal weaknesses, a failure of imagination that favors conformity and safety over change and diversity. Yes, the empire is sick, and, what is worse, it is trying to become accustomed to its sores. This is the aim of my explorations: examining the traces of happiness still to be glimpsed, I gauge its short supply. If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance. I will put my conclusion in spoiler tags, because it is too beautiful and elegant to be left out, but also too relevant as the solution to the puzzle to be revealed in advance.(view spoiler)[ In a final dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, they dwell on the subject of fictional cities in literature, utopian and dystopian, and on the unavoidable death and destruction waiting for them at the end of the road. The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space. (hide spoiler)]
"Tidak mudah untuk menjelaskan isi novel ini. Setiap usaha untuk melakukannya tampaknya hanya akan berakhir sia-sia. Bukan semata karena gambaran kota-kota magis dan surealis yang ada di dalamnya, tetapi juga karena keindahan puitisnya. Inilah novel dimana kemustahilan imajinasi bertemu dengan pasangan sempurnanya : kefasihan bercerita "Itu kata endorsementnya.Tadinya saya mengira bahwa pujian untuk buku ini terlampau berlebihan. Tapi begitu habis bab-bab awal, saya sadar, pujian tersebut justru terasa terlalu rendah hati.Buku ini memang unik luar biasa. dicetak dengan format pocket book--bahkan komik Doraemon pun masih lebih tebal-- cerita yang tersaji di dalamnya benar-benar memikat, meluber melebihi ukuran bukunya. Sebuah buku yang memanjakan mata akan bahasanya yang puitis dan memuaskan imajinasi dengan cerita yang menghanyutkan.Membaca buku ini laiknya membaca buku Mimpi-mimpi Einstein-nya Alan Lightman, di mana keindahan prosa puitis mengalir lancar sepanjang aliran cerita. Sangat kentara kalau Calvino memilih kata-kata dalam buku ini dengan sangat cermat. Bagaimana tidak, jika pengarang lain akan menghabiskan berlembar-lembar kata pujian dekriptif tentang suatu keindahan, Calvino cukup merangkumnya dalam satu kalimat saja. Tidak heran kan kalo novel ini menjadi novel bisa tipis nan imut? Para pujangga (amatiran) yang biasanya membuncah-buncah dalam berkata-kata mestinya malu pada Calvino.Isi ceritanya? saya setuju dg endorsementnya, kalau upaya untuk mengintisarikan isi novel ini akan sukar, dan mungkin jatuh pada kesia-siaan. Well, memang cara terbaiknya adalah membaca sendiri isi bukunya. Benar-benar keren. Sensasi ini mungkin akan dialami jika kita membaca mahakarya prosa puitis lainnya seperti karya Rumi atau Nietzche.Ok, saya akan berusaha merangkum ceritanya--cmiiw--. Kisah ini bercerita tentang perjalanan seorang penjelajah (dari Eropa) dalam mengunjungi negri-negri eksotis (di Asia?). Di mana dalam perjalanannya, dia mengunjungi kota-kota dengan keindahan sempurna pada zamannya. Sang penjelajah (teridentifikasi sebagai Marcopolo) menceritakan perjalanan menakjubkannya itu pada Sang Kaisar (Kubilai Khan) betapa kota-kota yang dia kunjungi begitu indah, modern, dan cantik. Sang Raja terpesona, dan meminta Sang penjelajah untuk terus bercerita. Uniknya, alih-alih menyebutkan nama kotanya, Calvino menyebutkan nama kotanya secara khayali dimana nama kota yg dia sebutkan tidak benar-benar ada di dunia, seperti Zora, Zirma, Eusaphia, dsb. Tapi, tak sebatas rincian keindahannya saja, Sang Penjelajah juga mengamati bahwa kota-kota tersebut dalam keadaan nyaris sekarat. Peperangan dan keterasingan nyaris meluluhlantahkan keindahan kota. Keindahan yang rapuh.Tapi, dengan mudah kita bisa menebak bahwa kota yang dimaksud Calvino adalah kota-kota di sekitar Asia Tengah, Asia Kecil, dan Asia Barat Daya. Soalnya, di abad pertengahan, ketika kota-kota Eropa sedang suram, kota-kota di Asia itu sedang cemerlang-secemerlangnya oleh keindahan arsitektur dan kemajuan ipteknya. Bahkan, kota yang berada di tengah gurun pun disulap menjadi istana megah dan lautan menara yang menjulang. Isfahan, Bukhara, Baku, Tashkent, dll telah menjadi simbol kemewahan dan modernitas pada masanya.Untungnya Marcopolo mengunjungi kota-kota eksotis tersebut dalam keadaan 'masih hidup'. Soalnya, tak lama kemudian, akibat peperangan dan keserakahan, kota-kota itu hilang, lenyap, sekarat, dan bangkrut. Bahkan sampai sekarang pun, kota-kota itu hanya dikenal sebagai kota tua yang eksotik, dan mati suri. Simbol modernitas masa lampau ituh malah menjadi ikon kota yang ketinggalan zaman dewasa ini. Dan Calvino dengan briliannya menceritakan keindahan kota itu secara dramatis pada detik-detik kejatuhannya. Sulit bukan menggambarkan sesuatu yang indah tapi sekaligus saat itu dia sedang mati suri dan sekarat? Calvino berhasil melakukannya. Dengan cemerlang dan apik.Dari sejarah kita tahu bahwa kota-kota indah itu --yang keindahannya menimbulkan romantisme dan mitos hingga sekarang--, kebanyakan dibangun oleh bangsa Mongol. Padahal yang namanya bangsa Mongol adalah bangsa yang suka berperang. Mereka tak segan-segan membunuh semua penduduk suatu kota. bangsa Mongol hanya mengijinkan hidup para seniman saja. Mereka dipaksa membangun kota yang lebih indah dari asalnya. kota yang dimatikan untuk dihidupkan.Konon Hulagu Khan membuat piramid dari tengkorak manusia. Alhasil, kota yang dibangun itu, di balik kemegahannya, ternyata sangat rapuh. Di balik dinding-dinding marmer mulusnyanya tersimpan kebusukan yang akan menggerogoti keabadiannya. lambat laun, kota-kota itu hilang dari peta bumi. Yah, seperti itulah gambaran kasar 'Kota-kota Imajiner'. Benar-benar harus mebacanya sendiri untuk ikut hanyut dalam romantime kota-kota ini. Mambaca buku ini kita seakan melancong ke sebuah negri asing yang hanya ada dalam dongeng. Kita akan memasuki relung-relung istana yang mewah sekaligus berdarah. seperti yang digambarkan Calvino tentang kota yang bernama Zora, "...Zora telah merana, terpecah belah, sirna. Bumi telah melupakannya...."Ironisnya, bahkan proses kota yang sekarat masih terus berlangsung dewasa ini. Bisa kita lihat bahwa kebanyakan kota yang mendapat julukan metropolitan, justru adalah kota-kota yang bisa dikatakan sebagai kota gagal... Kesenjangan sosial, kriminalitas, kerapuhan nilai susila hingga ketimpangan ekosistem, membuat bangunan megah nan menjulang hanya sebagai topeng bagi wajah kota yang bopeng...berikut ada pujian dari majalah Times Literary Suplement yang prestisius itu,".... mendedahkan ide, kiasan, dan wawasan imajinatif yang mempesona hampir di setiap halamannya..."
What do You think about Invisible Cities (1974)?
I read the edition translated into Scots by Wullie Weaver. Here are a few excerpts:Repulsive Cities ∙ 2The red brick edifices tower over the populace, signifers of a forgotten dream, of a thought abandoned in the ailing conscious of intrepid colonial adventurers. A range of hominids patrol the looming DSS office walls, dishing out abuse to obese mothers and wageless wanderers. This is a city of broken faeces, a city of cross-eyed big brothers, watching from the skies for a sign of salvation, something to lift this horrible land to a brighter plateau. In every repulsive city there is a gem, a signal: the kindly arms of naïve temptresses.Backward Cities ∙ 5In a field of obtuse posies I come across a farmer, tilling the field with his bent hoe, straining crops into order. “Quaint vassal, wherefore the heart of this green desert?” I ask. “In the shiny breasts of my daughter, that’s where, oh-lordy-aye,” he says. Across the road I spy a girl with the face of this man, his features as though transcribed on her red-rosied skin. All around me, a tissue of incestuous progenies, mixing their colours, discussing the fastest route into hell, where redemption no longer achieves the mythos of a dream.Pretentious Cities ∙ 1Among the golden buttresses sits a Lord, his luxurious grey beard brushing the bespectacled inhabitants, reading from the Great Works. Etched in history, the builders and planners, their names spelt in flashing neon clouds, passing through the streets, filling the people with words and ideas. Down the street a gemstone, doused in the milks of the Great Poets, where scholars feed from, where the fools are sacrificed at the altar of knowledge.
—MJ Nicholls
Given the subject matter—um, descriptions of cities—I wasn’t expecting this book to affect me on such a personal, visceral level. But during the final city description and again in Marco Polo’s closing dialogue with Kublai Khan, I got serious chills. And to put that in perspective, I was finishing it outside (90+ degrees) George Bush Intercontinental Houston, or whatever the hell that airport’s called. Now this effect may have been compounded by the fact that I was also listening to the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack. Despite the inarguable greatness of Basil Poledouris’ score, however, I have no doubt that it was this book that ultimately moved me to an epidermal state that has no business budding on a summer day in Texas. It’s that good—a philosophical gem and a gratifying guide for the adventurous mind and wonder-full spirit. It took two or three city descriptions for me to realize that Marco Polo wasn't describing cities so much as the human mind and experience. Rather than take away from the beautiful physicality of the descriptions, however, this gives the book a limitless pleasure and depth. How to describe it? It's like a children's book for adults. There's this magical other-world, other-time feel that's complex and meaningful and gorgeous. Think about a fairy tale with its shiny storyline, ex facie, that's also serving up something edifying and subtextual. Invisible Cities is the grown-up version. And the descriptions are often just curious and strange enough that you can come away with multiple meanings, in part determined by your current mental/emotional state. Sometimes I was too puzzled or infatuated with the physical description to divine much of anything coherent, but this serves to make the inevitable reread that much more appealing. As Calvino via Polo tells us, it is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear. Amen.
—Bram
Italo Calvino is a veritable drug. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise, and don't trust them if they do.Ever since the rapturous reading experience that is If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, I have been hooked on the man's words. As it is with most blossoming relationships, I'm a little wary of coming on too strong or getting too close too quickly and chipping away at the charming veneer of novelty in the throes of my overeager enthusiasm before we've gotten comfortable with each other, but this is the third book of his I've read in a year (exactly a year, actually) and I am just as giddily smitten with Invisible Cities as I was with my aforementioned introduction to Calvino's works and also Cosmicomics. Invisible Cities clocks in at a seemingly stingy 165 pages, with many pages only half-filled and a number of them left conspicuously blank. But since this is a Calvino novel, his beautiful, beautiful words are only a fraction of the payoff: The ideas, the images, the quiet messages, the prophetic warnings disguised as storytelling, the dreamlike quality licking at the edges of every sentence and even the apparent silences of seemingly unused spaces carry more weight than they would if they were crafted by any other writer's hand. And there is not a sentence that does no warrant savoring with a second or third read in this entire book.This novel is what happens when two historical figures -- in this case, an elderly but spirited Kublai Khan and the younger traveler Marco Polo -- whose lone commonality is being alive at the same time try to communicate without sharing a language. Polo conveys the cities (or is it just one city's many faces?) he has seen to the emperor through gestures, objects and other nonverbal cues. Like Cosmicomics, it is a map comprising the essences of things; like If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, the reader becomes part of the narrative as he is welcome to draw his own conclusions just as much as Khan is. I think I've made it pretty clear in previous reviews that I love duality and the play between opposing forces in my reading materials of choice, probably to the point that I find them in places they don't really live. Invisible Cities has 'em by the fistfuls, though. The palpably dynamic tension between the visible and in-, happiness and misery, the imagined and the real, the living and the dead, the storyteller and his audience, the roaring inferno and the heavenly plains, the finite work of creation and infinite motion of ruin, the image and its mirrored reflection was a delight unto itself, but the additional step of blurring the lines between each extreme with every achingly gorgeous stop on the raconteur's journey through recollection and the listener's odyssey of imagination was exactly the kind of extra mile I expect Calvino to traverse with gusto. There is an inversion of expectations that gives each push-and-pull pairing of opposites some of the hazy magic that is so particular to Calvino's works. It's not entirely surprising to read about cities where the living envy the cities of their dead to the point of emulation and confusion as to which populous is really alive, or whose people are more at peace with the certainty of obliteration than their earthbound counterparts because their metropolis is built upon a spider-web network of ropes and they are all too aware that their precarious balance could fail at any moment (is there anyone more alive than those who are reminded of death on a daily basis?). But there is a pleasant surprise when the design of a carpet and the layout of a city are echoes of each other; oracles who are consulted about the mystical connection between two unlikely entities only offer the ambiguous insight that "[o]ne of the two objects…. has the form the gods gave the starry sky and the orbits in which the worlds revolve; the other is an approximate reflection, like every human creation." While there are common threads and themes woven throughout Polo's narratives, no two cities (or no two faces of the city) are examined in the same way. The cities' signs, desires, dead, names, skies and other shared traits may be explored but never to the same effect. And sometimes seemingly unrelated characteristics make similar points: A city would have no history without its dead, just as its living have no motivation for progress without acknowledging the mistakes upon which a history was built, just as the dead have a peace that the living won't know without forging ahead in life. There is a sense of concentricity that unites each urban observation, which, along with the interspersed exchanges between emperor and explorer, help move the novel toward its oft-hinted-at augury of urgency that reaches its climax as the stories reach their conclusion, as relevant as it was centuries ago when Marco Polo and Kublai Khan were supposedly having their animated discourse in a garden, as when Invisible Cities was published four decades ago, as when I finished it this morning: The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, and make them endure, give them space.
—Madeleine
