Cecily's Reviews > Invisible Cities

The photo is of new and old Shanghai, photographed by Greg Girard in 2000 (source), chronologically equidistant between my two visits there. It is, and maybe always has been, a city of contrasting, unequal, parts and pairs, like many of the Invisible Cities.

“Each man bears in his mind a city made only of differences.”

Listen

I’ve been eavesdropping on the mysterious, hypnotic conversations between a famous explorer from antiquity and the powerful emperor of a distant land: Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.

Exotic places are conjured by gestures, emblems, and words. Then the tables turn, and the Khan describes the cities of his dreams and asks Polo if they exist.

But is it the 55 cities bearing female names, or many aspects of a single city (Venice), or nearer a hundred cities (many of them have twins or doubles)?

Submit to Enchantment

It’s deliciously slippery collection of prose poems about places, grouped by words and numbers, repeated in different permutations that defy a single interpretation (though many have been applied, including sine waves). It suggests multiple routes of reading, much like some of the twisted and recursive paths through the cities themselves. There are Cities and Memory, Cities and Desire, Cities and Signs, Thin Cities, Trading Cities, Cities and Eyes, Cities and Names, Cities and the Dead, Cities and the Sky, Continuous Cities, and Hidden Cities.

It purports to be about physical places, but as it explores “the invisible order that sustains cities”, there are twists and forks in time as well as geography: “the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time”.

I fear that if I try to constrain these kaleidoscopic and sometimes paradoxical visions to black and white marks on a screen, I will somehow kill the enchantment – for myself as well as for anyone reading.

Do

These are places you must experience for yourself, walking the streets; crossing the canals; peering in windows; holding your nose at the stench; marvelling at the architecture; gazing at the underclad bathing beauties; exploring the exotic markets; puzzling at the frequent mentions of pipes, taps, gutters, and sewers; choking on smoke, and always seeking fresh revelations.

As you wander, you can wonder how the cities are simultaneously similar and yet startlingly different: it’s never clear quite what real and what is not, what is cause and what is effect. Perhaps that’s part of the invisibility of the title.

Whether this is travelling through China, Calvino, Venice or an atlas in a library, your journey will not be the same as mine, and nor will my subsequent ones. We will not be the same people, either.

Meanwhile, in another city, another Cecily is writing a completely different review…

Related Books

• This was my second Calvino. Structurally, it can seem much simpler than If on a winter’s night a traveler, but it’s oddly harder to review.

• A few months before this, I read and loved Andrew Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams. Having read Invisible Cities, I now realise how heavily influenced Lightman was: in content, structure, style… every way. Whether you class it as homage or borderline plagiarism is debatable, but it does not detract from my enjoyment at the time, and I think Lightman’s book is probably the more accessible of the two, even though it is primarily about physics/time, rather than geography.

• Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion portrays a magical Venice of shifting routes that is beautifully reminiscent of Calvino.

Quotes

• “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.”
• “Anastasia awakens desires one at a time only to force you to stifle them, when you awaken in the heart of Anastasia one morning your desires waken all at once and surround you… You believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave.”
• “You penetrate it along its streets thick with signboards jutting from the walls. The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things.”
• “Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages.”
• “Does your journey take place only in the past?”
• “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had… Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.”
• “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.”
• “The most fixed and calm lives… are spent without any repetition.”
• “The exhalations that hang over the roofs of the metropolises, the opaque smoke that is not scattered, the hood of miasmata that weighs over the bituminous streets. Not the labile mist of memory nor the dry transparance, but the charring of burned lives that forms a scab on the city, the sponge swollen with vital matter that no longer flows, the jam of past, present, future that blocks existences calcified in the illusion of movement: this is what you would find at the end of your journey.”
• “Traveling, you realize that differences are lost… Your atlas preserves the differences.”
• “A voluptuous vibration constantly stirs Chloe, the most chaste of cities. If men and women began to live their ephemeral dreams, every phantom would become a person with whom to being a story… and the carousel of fantasies would stop.”