Arctangential

I finished Invisible Cities yesterday afternoon. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

I’ve spent some time thinking about how to discuss the book here, and I’ve had some trouble coming up with a good approach. It’s hard to discuss any major section of the book without quoting it extensively; there’s not a lot that Calvino says in the book that I would be able to explain in words other than those that he used. However, I usually try to keep these little reviews down to about 3 paragraphs, so there’s no way I can reasonably write all that out. Not to mention, I’ve already wasted my first paragraph talking about it.

The story — or more properly concept — of the piece is that Marco Polo is telling Kublai Khan about the cities he’s visited in his travels. The book is structured so that we have short segments of discourse between Polo and Khan surrounding 4 or 5 sections each of which describes a city. This book isn’t really a novel. Not much really happens, when certain events are described, they’re in no particular narrative order. I wanted to describe the book as a kind of exploded poem: paragraphs for lines, sections for stanzas and chapters for cantos, but at the end of the day that just doesn’t work. The book defies categorization and synopsis; maybe that’s the best way to describe it.

Each section that describes a city uses extreme detail and specificity to illuminate a much more general concept. These are laid out in both thematic and ordinal groupings which share a common direction, but are out of sync. One thematic group is “Cities & Memory”. “Cities & Memory 1″ is followed immediately by “Cities & Memory 2″, but “Cities & Desire 1″ comes before we get to “Cities & Memory 3″. “Cities & Memory 4″ is separated from that by another 2 cities, and so on. The sections detailing the communication between Polo and Khan deal more with concepts which rule over the book as a whole: communication, symbolism and representation.

I really love this book. It’s not something to be rushed through, but rather to be savored, to be examined, dissected, considered and re-considered. I don’t generally read books more than once, but in this case I’ll be making an exception.

And now, having gone over my paragraph allotment, my next book is Philip Pullman’s Clockwork.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 17th, 2006 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.