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jackwwang 's review for:
Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
Reminds me of the Alchemist in its brevity and ineffable mysteriousness. Reading this book feels like dreaming an endless dream, entering a landscape where the physics and rules of reality are unfamiliar, but yet retains the texture of truth. Calvino's Marco Polo tells tales of cities from his travels to Kublai Khan in an echo of Arabian nights, and the books shifts from Polo's accounts to conversations between Polo and the Khan.
The cities described seem to come out of a Jungian dreamscape of distilled truths of humanity, Despina - the platonic border city, Octavia - precariousness and mortality manifested. Calvino's Polo declares - "Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else." The imagery Calvino conjures is striking. Eusapia the city with an upper city and a lower mirrored city of the dead, with skeletons going about their banal business in the earth.
However, I was more drawn to the dialogue between Polo and the Khan, conversations that are meditations on tricky ideas of reality, myth, memory, possession, past, future, truth, facsimile.
What does it all mean? It is tempting to interpret some concrete thread of coherent meaning, but Calvino warns us:
Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms. “On the day when I know all the emblems,” he asked Marco, “shall I be able to possess my empire, at last?” And the Venetian answered: “Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems.”
The cities described seem to come out of a Jungian dreamscape of distilled truths of humanity, Despina - the platonic border city, Octavia - precariousness and mortality manifested. Calvino's Polo declares - "Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else." The imagery Calvino conjures is striking. Eusapia the city with an upper city and a lower mirrored city of the dead, with skeletons going about their banal business in the earth.
However, I was more drawn to the dialogue between Polo and the Khan, conversations that are meditations on tricky ideas of reality, myth, memory, possession, past, future, truth, facsimile.
What does it all mean? It is tempting to interpret some concrete thread of coherent meaning, but Calvino warns us:
Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms. “On the day when I know all the emblems,” he asked Marco, “shall I be able to possess my empire, at last?” And the Venetian answered: “Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems.”