"Invisible Cities" - Italo Calvino (7-21 Dec)

I'm not too sure what I expected after reading "If on a winter's night a traveller...", but it certainly wasn't this.

One thing I liked about that one was the puzzle-like way it was written in, kind of like "The Solitaire Mystery", together with the smoked-up reflections on what it is to read, write, and simultaneously being part of the made-up narrative that is life. "Invisible Cities" was definitely much more loose, and more of an expressionistic way of talking about a city, or cities. Or the world. Or everything, as according to Calvino, it seems, everything relevant to human history can be learned by remembering, looking at, or imagining a city.

As usual, with a book without much of a plot, it took me a while to ease myself into it, but this one I ended up enjoying, and as the interlude-like conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan began to take shape - or rather, to more explicitly lose it in clear directions - things began to click together.

To begin with, there was the expanding conversation about language. It wasn't long before I realized that these two personas might not have actually been talking at all. Not just because they openly say something along the lines of "this moment might not be real", but because they bring up the illusion of communication all the time. While Marco Polo learns new languages through his (imagined?) travels, presumably being able to make himself more and more clear, I kept wondering more and more whether these cities were actually the ones he imagined. Suddenly, this comes to mind, especially the last verse:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11uI-uy33uU

So it's not so much about what is told, but about the whole impression of the book:

- Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: "Why do you speak to me of stones? It is only the arch that matters to me."

- Polo answers: "Without stones, there is no arch."

Pretty straightforward wisdom at first, if you ask me: no man is an island, we're all connected, of course. But I think they're not just talking about "the arch of human history/society", they're also talking about smaller things, like telling a story; the way you react to a certain comment; why your orange juice tastes funny right after brushing your teeth, which leaves a sense of disappointment in your mouth that lingers throughout your morning and keeps you from fully enjoying the cup of coffee you will have between your morning lectures, making you fall asleep halfway through the second one and thus feeling extremely embarrassed at your lecturer, because she's also your dissertation supervisor and oh gosh, you've already asked her to write you a recommendation letter for a postgraduate programme at Oxford University and... Well...

"It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear." Which I think applies on two levels: we read others' stories filling them with our own experiences or expectations; at the same time we arrange our own histories in the order that seems to suit us best - the ear, here, being whatever is in our best interest, how we want to see ourselves.

A couple of the cities seemed riven with Christian morality. The description of one of them struck me as strongly sexist (the "inhabitants" would cyclically take up different "wives").  Another few seemed plagued with a straightforward consumerist ethos. Some others were interestingly mystical and made me think that Borges' library was actually hidden in there. One of them reminded me particularly of Caracas - one of the most grim ones. But then again, maybe I've made this particular impression of Caracas feel like all of Caracas to me, as an excuse for me to be disgusted by it. Maybe that's just me being smug and justifying the desires that draw me in other directions.

But as the last passage reminds me way too much of this:

http://italian.about.com/library/anthology/dante/blinferno003.htm

I can't help but taking the very closing line as sound advice I shall carry close to heart.