9/3/10

Book Review (Theory of Settlements)

INVISIBLE CITIES (1972)
by ITALO CALVINO

Invisible Cities, a book by Italo Calvino, is about the conversations between Kublai Khan, the King, and Marco Polo, the explorer, discussing Marco Polos’ descriptions of the cities he had visited. Each city is narrated by explaining what they stand for, metaphysically, and architecture is used to emphasize them. Marco Polo did not share a common language with the King, and so communicated his stories through actions and objects collected by him, on his journey. All the cities were different but towards the end, I realised, they had an underlying similarity. They all talked about different characteristics of a generic, real city.
Raison d'être, Reason for being, is a phrase that repeatedly kept coming up in my mind as I read through this book. The places and cities talked about were so connected to the inhabitants of the area or to the lack of them and gave the impression of a cycle between the people and the place. It made me think that if one survived, the other one wouldn’t, at least not happily, but at the same time required each other to exist.
There is always a comparison being made in each of the descriptions of the cities. They are either compared to their past or to an identical city of the dead or even to the skies. The author talks about multiple reflections of the same city representing different aspects of the people; their fears, feelings, hopes and memories. There is no sense of ‘city development’ the way we have been taught to see it, but development or degradation of the city inflicted directly by the emotions of its inhabitants.  The people strived for a utopian life, but the more they changed their cities to fit the image, the further they went from it or soon realised that, their image was a false utopia.
Something I found interesting as I was reading the book was that all, or at least most, of the cities has feminine names and also that women represented desire, sometimes quite ostensibly and sometimes understated. Women were the protagonists of the mens’ fantasies. They portrayed serenity and hopelessness but never happiness, only a false sense of it. In retrospect, I feel that the author might have despised them as the women always turn out to be deceitful.
At the end, Marco Polo and Kublai Khan discuss the fate of the city; it emerging as the already existing ‘inferno’ or hell. To survive, one must either knowingly suffer or rise above.
There are a lot of double entendres in the stories and it is not those plot based, ‘can’t keep the book down’ kind of novels. In fact, I feel, to fully understand the philosophy, I had to repeatedly take a moment (quite a few of them, actually) and think over what I had just read. I still feel that I only understand the crux of it, even after reading some parts over a second time. There are so many phrases and ideologies that stayed with me after reading the book and so many things I understood but I can’t explain.  I plan to reread slowly, at my own pace and over a long period of time.
Invisible Cities is one of those books, which, even after reading again and again, you will always find something that you missed from the times you read it before.
“A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving” – Lao Tzu                      

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