Calvino is an author that has been on my radar as a challenge. When I saw a couple of his books for cheap at the used bookshop, I couldn’t resist. It wasn’t a difficult read, in the sense that I understood all the sentences. I just couldn’t seem to connect the dots.

So join me as I try to do that. Buckle up.

The book is short, with a ton of short chapters.

Several are exchanges between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. The idea is that Polo is describing cities to the Khan that are apparently part of his empire. Each of the several dozen other chapters is a description of a city.

Over the course of it, the Khan seems to grow suspicious of Polo, and the way he describes cities, like he’s just making them up, or being so vague or obtuse that his descriptions are useless.

To make sense of it, I started with a NYT review (gift link, for what it’s worth) of the book when it was first published. It was useless to me, it certainly didn’t shed any light on things. Here’s an NPR article that seems written by a guy who wants you to know he gets it, but doesn’t do much to tell you what it is.

Reading about Calvino wasn’t much help either. Might be useful for the next one of his that I read.

This Wikipedia bit sums up the structure, but the wiki page is no help as far as the why or the what I just read. It’s interesting but not helpful. By this point, I admire the book, but still feel like I don’t get the book.

Here’s an article from Dr. Julia McClure at the University of Glasgow that sets it up for us:

In 1271 the young Venetian Marco Polo began a 5600 mile journey across the land and maritime routes of the ‘silk roads’, which had connected the Eastern and Western ends of Eurasia since the times of the Han and Roman Empires, to the new capital of the Great Khan in Beijing. This description of the historic encounter is not taken from a thirteenth century source but rather is the opening line to the novel Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili) written by the Cuban born Italian novelist Italo Calvino in 1972. This novel imagines Polo describing to the Khan all the cities that he passed through on his journey from Venice to the Far East. Polo’s descriptions of the world express a sense of wonder, they are colourful, and often fanciful.

OK, we’re getting somewhere.

There are a lot of striking sentences and ideas about how a journey affects and changes the significance of arriving at the destination. How current things add context to our past, and how we reinterpret our own pasts through the lens of more current experiences.

Dr. McClure again:

Calvino’s Invisible Cities points to the invisible edges between reality and fiction, between memory and desire, and between the past and the present. Calvino’s odyssey is a reminder that people can travel and try to understand the world, but they will always arrive at the cross-roads of interpretation.

So here we have it. I like this. The whole McClure thing is worth reading, and I think it would be a useful introduction to the novel.

Her conclusion, roughly:

Italo Calvino’s work is classed as ‘fabulist’, a genre related to magical realism…[it] offers a gateway to a world in place and time are experienced in alternate ways. In this way, literature is important to certain understandings in global history as it teaches us that we must leave behind more familiar ways of knowing and orientating ourselves if we are able to encounter something different.

This gives me reassurance that I did get it, to some degree. Calvino has ideas about how we can revisit and reinterpret our past, present, and future. There isn’t a single right way to experience the world, and when we try to connect and communicate with another person, our language and focus is always rooted in our own circumstance and experience.

I’m sure there’s more to it, and it’s definitely a book that launched a thousand Ph.D. theses. There are no doubt a lot of people that would read this and shake their head because I didn’t get it. Maybe I’ll read it again years from now and draw something more profound from it. Maybe I’ll have a discussion about it with someone who can teach me more. Are you that person?

There you have it. It was a rewarding and kind of enriching experience, even if it did feel a bit like high school. I’m looking forward to reading more Calvino, just not right away. This is the kind of thing the internet was made for.