Review by Yasmine Hassan
Italo Calvino was the maestro of the cumulative and of digression. He was the magician who scattered constellated knowledge only to leave it twinkling in our mind’s eye, each fragment a piece of the holographic cosmos. In Invisible Cities the fragments are composed of fifty-five descriptions of cities. Each one summons the reader to eavesdrop on a sustained dialogue between Kublai Khan, the great Mongol Emperor of China, and Marco Polo, the great explorer and adventurer. However, the main objective of this necromancer Calvino is to beckon operative spirits; to bring to life invisible cities, both real and imagined. Marco Polo becomes Kublai Khan’s Shaman. Suddenly we become Polo/Khan/Calvino/I imagining a city. Then another, and another…
When Polo, the Venetian merchant of Slovenian-Croatian origin, enters the story, he is only able to communicate with the Great Khan through gestures. The Lord of the largest Empire in history watches entranced as Polo produces rebus-like objects to tell his tales of far away metropolises. Polo commences his narration of the cities visited as if he is playing charades. The storyteller is like a Homo sapiens before language development, determined to convey a description the wonders he has seen through signs and symbols. Thereafter, Polo progresses through the tale increasing his mastery of the Mongol language, until he achieves perfect fluency. Once he has attained fluency there is something missing from the magic of the story so he reverts back to his elliptical descriptions of each city. Without fail each tale of a different city induces rêverie in both the Emperor and the explorer.
The great ruler cannot leave the imperial city and the great voyager cannot return home to Venice. Invisible cities is a heart-wrenching text for those of us who have left our city only to return and find another in its place. “Our city is gone…” sang Chrissie Hynde. Sometimes our city can vanish while we sleep. We awaken and find monstrosities, ugly buildings, highways, trees ripped up. We grieve our lost city. Cities empty because of wars, because of the construction of gigantic dams, because of Chernobyls, because of Tsunami’s… and the people left behind wander the vacant city streets haunted by the ghosts of those who fled. For some, the invisible city is the city that has literally vanished. Some cities simply evaporate because styles and generations change. We see evidence of the past glory of certain cities in individuals who still wear the same styles, listen to the same music, and still have the same furniture. The nostalgia for a period, as different as 1950s Motown or 1950s Bucharest, can have the capacity to retain a person in a tight grip where time seems frozen. The city decays but the nostalgic citizen doesn’t wish to let go of their city.
I am certain that most people on earth have imagined a city. How many of us have conjured the City of Oz in our imaginations? Or perhaps it was St. Petersburg after reading a Russian novel? Perhaps one has run through the slums of London with Oliver Twist, or lingered in Lisbon with Ricardo Reis longing for love. Have you become a subversive in the dystopian city along with D-503 and O-90? Did Jorge Luis Borges’ Alphaville materialize on a rainy night? Maybe you are even worse than the reader making their way through city after city? It could be that you weren’t satisfied with all the cities you read about in history texts, in novels, in science fiction, in comics, in fantasy books? Perhaps you undertook your own odyssey and travelled far away only to return with personal tales of distant cities. Did you entice your friends and families with descriptions of bridges, ports, verdant avenues, fabulous markets proffering strange wares, beautiful men and women? I am certain that some of you have manifested your inability to live happily in whatever city you now call home. You exhibit constant yearnings for some other city in which you have never set foot – Buenos Aires, Mumbai, Paris, London, Verona, Cairo, Tokyo, Mexico City, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Moscow, Vancouver, Montréal, New York…. Your lover (if you are lucky enough to have one) may have tried to convince you that you are better off staying at home. Nevertheless, all the books you have read lead you to believe that romance, adventure, and success are to be found in the remote city that you have only read about in books. You wish to leave the familiar. You do not wish to believe that all cities are fundamentally the same, with similar problems. Calvino would agree with you.
One soon discovers that city planners and architects purposely design new cities based upon cities they grew up in and for which they are nostalgic. Calvino’s tale reminds us of these incongruous grafting of dreams onto stone. A looming statue O Cristo Redentor gazes down upon Rio de Janeiro. How could Beirut be the Zurich of the Arab world? How could Baghdad be the city of Alph Layla Wa Layla (A Thousand and One Nights) and also be the theatre of Operation Desert Storm? How many CN Towers have gone up around the world? We don’t just wish to see a picture of la Tour Eiffel, no we wish to ride up to the top and see Paris for ourselves from this vantage point. We wish to ride in a gondola in Venice. We want to enter the Imperial city in Beijing. If your friends go to Beijing, you may feel jealous even if you have never contemplated a trip to China. You may regard everyone leaving your city for another city as someone far more fortunate than yourself.
In Calvino’s book Marco Polo pulls the Great Khan inexorably into a Wonderland where questions remain unanswered. Does it matter if the cities which Polo describes are real or imagined? They have always had the power to influence the way in which other cities grow. Ancient Romans admired ancient Greeks and so one has the Coliseum influenced by Greek architecture; the Arabs left their traces in Grenada with the Alhambra palace; Parisians admired classical Rome and so you have des Champs-Élysées and L’Arc de Triomphe; Diego Rivera murals in Detroit reflect the influence of Mexican indigenous art.
I digress yet again, so let me return to Invisible cities. Close your eyes for just a few moments and imagine the marvel which is Venice. What superb imagination conceived its labyrinths? Venice was the home of Marco Polo. Contemporary Beijing rests upon the foundations of Kublai Khan’s capital city of Cambuluc. The Khan’s summer capital city was called Shángdu (Chinese: 上都 ). Shángdu was the mystical Xanadu of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan (1816) and at the time of Calvino’s story (circa 1275 AD) its’ walls enclosed more than 100,000 inhabitants, 20,000 of whom were official well-respected courtesans, and 10,000 of whom constituted the Great Khan’s personal bodyguard. From Venice to Cambuluc to Shángdu, what could be more fantastic? Calvino’s text is astonishing. You leave it wishing to know all about Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. It provokes thoughts concerning the manner in which living in a city shapes its inhabitants and brands its visitors. Reading the book makes you wonder why some cities are made only for leave-taking and others for love-making.
Before leave-taking and love-making, one must consider how someone decides to found a city. At one time indigenous peoples shared the land with noxious plants, ravenous insects, and ferocious beasts. Italo Calvino makes you wonder what pushed the invaders, the conquerors, to combat nature. Builders of cities have battled to wipe out scorpions, spiders, rats, termites, carnivores, and poison ivy to raise their cities high. Ultimately, you must also ask yourself if all you know, and all you have, is connected in some manner to the invisible cities, to the hives of culture. Take something simple, your blue denim jeans. They are called denim because the material first originated in Nîmes, a city in France (de Nîmes = denims), where blue dyes from Damascus (Syria) were used to colour the clothes of workers. Our language is permeated by “foreign” words from other cities – coffee from the Arabic word Kahwa which came from the word Cacao from the Americas. The train station in Moscow is termed Yaroslavsky Vauxhall (1867) because it is derived from the name of an English train station, with the first steam engines – Vauxhall Station (1837), London, UK. Isn’t it wonderfully bizarre that each train station in Russia is called a Вокзал /vauxhall? A Russian architect visits Vauxhall Station in London but what did he tell his colleagues about the English City? How did the Muscovite describe London to his Moscow peers?
While we can see the traces of one city upon other cities, we are left with many mysteries concerning ancient cities. What has happened to Timbuktu, to Sana’a, to Carthage, to Kathmandu, to Chitzen Itza, to Petra, to Babel…? Why is the city of Jodhpur blue and Marrakesh red? Which element determines the life of the city – the wind, the rain, the snow, the sand, the heat, the cold? Invisible cities opens you to wonderment about everything which surrounds you. After reading this book you will never again be able to fill a glass with tap- water without thinking about the network of pipes which run underground. You will find it difficult to resist looking back at the stone faces peering down at you from building façades. Take yourself to a bridge spanning the Don River and try to imagine the place before Toronto was a city. Imagine when indigenous peoples travelled from Tulum, up the Mississippi River, across the Great Lakes to reach Kanata. The ravine was once filled with water that carried travellers from distant cities. Invisible cities reminds us that our descriptions of where we come from and where we have been have incredible power to shape what will be. What is more amazing is that our utopias, dystopias, fantastic cities, future cities, they all play just as much a role in