Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
Summary
Marco Polo describes fifty five imagined cities, each given a woman's name, to an aging Kublai Khan, who is trying, through these reports, to understand an empire that has grown too vast for him to see any longer with his own eyes. Each city is a short prose poem built around one idea taken entirely literally: a city suspended on stilts over a void, a city that exists twice, once as the version its residents believe they inhabit and once as an identical mirror city of the dead, a city its own inhabitants tear down and rebuild every single morning. Calvino arranges the descriptions into eleven recurring categories, among them Cities and Memory, Cities and Desire, and Thin Cities, five entries each, spread across nine chapters and broken up by short dialogues between Khan and Polo. Late in the book Khan admits he no longer trusts anything Polo tells him, uncertain whether the cities are genuine reports or fables invented purely to please him, and Polo answers, in the line most often quoted from the book, that every time he describes a city he is really describing Venice, his own home, never named outright until that admission arrives. The book offers no plot to resolve, only Polo's closing advice to Khan on how to endure hell while living inside it: to seek out whatever in that hell is not hell, and make it last.
The book has almost no forward motion in the usual sense, and a reader looking for a conventional story will not find one; it reads instead like a collection meant to be entered anywhere rather than raced through start to finish, each city only a page or two long. Calvino, associated with the constraint driven Oulipo group of writers, structured the whole book around a symmetrical numerical pattern, and the book rewards slow, repeated reading far more than a single pass through it.
Historical Context & Significance
Giulio Einaudi published Le città invisibili in Italian in 1972; William Weaver's English translation followed from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1974. It was a finalist for the 1975 Nebula Award for Best Novel, an unusual instance of a largely plotless literary novel in translation reaching a genre prize built mainly around American science fiction, though it did not win. Calvino himself resisted a single reading of it; speaking at a 1983 Columbia University conference, he described the book as built like a polyhedron, with conclusions scattered along every one of its edges rather than gathered at a single ending.
Its influence has spread mainly through other writers rather than through prizes, cited repeatedly by later novelists working with fragmented or nested structures. An experimental 2013 opera adaptation staged at Los Angeles's Union Station was itself a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music, one more honor that reached the book by way of an adaptation rather than for the original text, much as the Nebula nomination reached it through a genre it only partly belonged to.