Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, 15.-28.12 (Sunniva)

Half of this was written as notes at home the night before I left for England, and right now I am writing it into text directly on Internet Explorer on Karla's parents' laptop.

I was definitely not entirely awake and aware when I started reading the book, since I can't remember much of the first cities. As mentioned before, I find it difficult to read short stories and poems, because they require a completely different reading pattern to my usual and preferred one. I prefer sitting down with a book and reading for a long time, and I just can't do that with shorter texts without forgetting some of them and mixing them up with one another.

That said, I really enjoyed this book once I got into it. I spent almost two weeks reading it, and only really read it at breakfast and before bedtime, so the reading pattern fit more with reading about one or two cities, which was perfect.

Here are some of my thoughts from looking through the book again once I'd finished it:

Cities and Signs were the most interesting ones to me: the importance of signs, Cities and Signs 4 with the palace being the prison and so on. 5 that there is a back to every pretty façade. The idea is repeated in several other cities, especially Cities and Eyes 5.

Trading Cities 3 where they swap their living, houses and surroundings every now and then to keep
happy seemed like a perfect but fantastical solution to the problem that pretty much every person in the world has at one time or another.

Cities and the dead frighten me. They're intriguing, but also disturbing.

Cities and the sky 2: Different cities but the same - I have no idea what this note means as I do not have the book with me.

Cities and memory, changing but having the same name. This goes into the whole theme of the book - which is not cities, to me, not even Venice, which I see it is to some, but society. The book, and specific cities, can be applied to so much, so many places and settings, that it's difficult to write about it.

Continuous cities 1: Leonia, where they buy new things every day "So you begin to wonder if
Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not,
instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity." p. 114
Leonia, to me, is Norway. Or the society we've become, which wants new things all the time, and half the reason is that we feel grand and rich and happy throwing away old things.

2: That all cities are becoming the same.

Sometimes there's an underground and skyscrapers, and so we are pointed to the meta fiction of it
all – same with Marco Polo and Kublai Khan debating their own existence.

I loved this idea in Trading cities 1: The trading of memories after one keyword.
"at each word that one man says – such as "wolf", "sister", "hidden treasure", "battle", "scabies", "lovers" – the others tell, each one, his tale of wolves, sisters, treasures, scabies, lovers, battles. And you know that in the long journey ahead of you, when to keep awake against the camel's swaying or the junk's rocking, you start summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battle other battles." p.36-37

Continuous Cities 5:

Penthesilea the city of suburbs reminds me of Managua - I'm too literal-minded but still it does. The neverendign suburbs, the non-existing city centre...

Berenice (Hidden Cities 5) is politics in my mind, even the new ones that take over are never that good even if they started with "just" thoughts.

You can tell that I'm a) busy celebrating New Years with friends I haven't seen in 18 months and b) not used to writing about short stories. I just put down all my thoughts about the different cities at home when I was supposed to be packing, late at night, the day before I flew over to England. And now the rest of the group is having pizza and I am honestly going to run off and join them and we can talk more about the book in comments and real life.

Short summary: I liked it. I need another book to read on the side in case I want to sit down with it for a long while, but I could easily do that. I do want to read his other books. And I am happy that this project is soon over, because it has been a little exhausting.
This edition: Published by Vintage, The Random House Group Limited, 1997