“Invisible Cities” is the perfect book for an existential crisis

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The inside cover of the book

Zoey Fox, Staff Reporter

“Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino is a book that unsettles the minds of any who have grown too accustomed to their own perspective. Through tantalizing descriptions of other times and places, this book forces the reader to question her own sense of identity and belonging in the world. Calvino asks us not just what and where we are, but whether we are.

“Invisible Cities” follows a conversation between the ruler of the 13th century Mongolian Empire, Kublai Khan, and his adventurer and advisor Marco Polo. The dialogue itself is interspersed among Marco Polo’s descriptions of the many cities he has seen, categorized under such headings as “Invisible Cities,” “Thin Cities” and “Cities and the Dead.”

Written in the 1970’s, this little book is timeless and without chronology. Calvino talks of cities outside of time; he describes cities equipped with modern inventions like cars and waste management infrastructure, then turns to explain a 13th century trading center bustling with outdoor markets and merchants.

Every city in the book is designated one page. Calvino begins by describing each place in prose resplendent with oxford commas. Though his sentences are occasionally long-winded, they offer the relief of concrete images in a book packed with abstractions. After giving the reader a sense of the physical city, he resolves each vignette with a profound conclusion drawn from his description of the place.

One of my favorite examples of these vignettes was the story of Anastasia. The story of this city serves as a tacit warning of the dangers of wanting—and having—everything. Marco Polo describes the extensive luxuries available in Anastasia, and explains that in the middle of the city, surrounded by all these desirous things, there is no reason to fight against wanting all of it. “The city appears to you as a whole where no desire is lost,” he explains, shifting from description to conclusion. In the final line about Anastasia, Polo warns that this city is treacherous. “Your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave.”

Throughout “Invisible Cities,” Calvino offers ideas about truth and falsehood, ideas about the effects of opposing perspectives and ideas about the impact of time and change on identity. But his central theme is existential: Calvino is addressing the subjectiveness of reality.

As the book progresses, the cities Marco Polo describes become more surreal, and by the end of the novel, it’s not clear whether any of these places exist at all. The reader’s developing uncertainty is paralleled in the novel by the conversations between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. They begin to speculate whether the cities of the empire and their conversations in the garden are real or imagined. By the end of the book, they have concluded that they themselves do not exist. These dialogues guide the direction of the reader’s thoughts and provide the space to pause and consider the complicated ideas Calvino presents with each new city.

Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” is discerning, subtle and poetic. It is a book whose every page and paragraph contains a valuable insight; it could be read from back to front and still challenge the reader to reevaluate her view of the world.