Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

There’s barely a plot here, if you’re coming to this expecting one, don’t. Marco Polo sits with an aging Kublai Khan and describes city after city, each a page or two, each impossible, a city built on stilts over its own reflection, a city where the dead outnumber the living and every new face just gets printed over an old, worn-out form the mind refuses to let go of. It’s less a novel than a sequence of prose poems organized loosely around categories, Cities and Memory, Cities and Desire, that kind of thing.

I’ll admit I fought the book at first, tried hard to follow it like a normal narrative and failed, and then I let go of that and just let the language carry me instead. That’s when it clicked. The images conjured are worth the price of admission on their own even when you can’t quite hold onto what any given city “means.” Somebody compared it to Einstein’s Dreams, which came later and clearly owes something to this structure, dreamlike vignettes that use a scientific or philosophical conceit as scaffolding for pure imagery.

It’s genuinely not a book for everyone, and I don’t think that’s snobbery to say, you kind of have to be willing to sit with ambiguity rather than demand it resolve. One review just said “loved Part 7, however,” having apparently bounced off the rest, which made me laugh because I get it, the sections don’t all land with equal force. Another admitted flatly they weren’t smart or patient enough for something this poem-like, and there’s an honesty in that I respect more than pretending to love every page.

By the end you realize, or I did anyway, that every city Marco describes might just be Venice described fifty-five different ways, memory refracting a single place into infinite variations. Whether that’s true or just a comforting reading, I’m not sure. Either way this is one of the books on my shelf I go back to reread a few pages of instead of rereading whole.