A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Italo Calvino’s Dreamlike Invisible Cities

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Invisible Cities by is unlike any book I’ve read before. It seems to exist in another plane entirely with its dreamlike short sections that each end with some philosophical statement. Each section left me wanting to ruminate on what I’ve just read rather than turning to the next. All of the cities are named for women and it made me wonder if Marco Polo (or rather Calvino through Polo) was talking about cities at all. Calvino peppers modern references like airplanes and Ferris wheels throughout the stories as if to say time is immaterial.

Building My Own Cities

Calvino’s descriptions of these cities are ethereal enough that I’m asked to construct my own images of the cities if I want them. Calvino has Polo describe one aspect of each city that is characteristic of it, and many of these are not concrete elements but rather a spirit of the city. Even when Polo specifically lists objects, as in this description of Zora, “[T]he copper clock follows the barber’s striped awning, then the fountain with the nine jets, the astronomer’s glass tower…” he uses few adjectives and my mind is free to make most of the picture, although I found myself grasping for these specifics to have something to begin building with. Of course if the physical description were essential to the experience he wanted to convey, Calvino would have written them in. This left me looking for what he was trying to convey.

With sentences like, “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: a foreignness of what you no longer are or possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places,” Calvino asks the reader to bring both meaning and interpretation into the story. What is it that you no longer are? What do you no longer possess? How is a space unpossessed or for that matter possessed? Long after I finished reading Calvino’s words, my mind worked over them.

Finding My Bearings Among the Grand Ideas

The difficulty for me lies in that much of the book is made up of these wide open ideas that I was trying to knit together and I found it hard to get my bearings. After the first ten cities I felt I was beginning to understand the world Calvino was creating. After the next ten I was looking for metaphors. After the full 165 pages I felt the meaning was so large I would never be able to grasp it and I was disheartened. This book was something I would have liked to have read one city at a time during a year or more just to absorb it—to fully explore all the possibilities of the cities and to construct the character and characteristics of each in my mind before moving onto the next. The cities were like the stones in Polo’s arch, but I wasn’t able to see the arch that the individual stones formed. The lasting impression of the book in my mind is instead the first line of Coleridge’s poem.

It is as though Calvino is using the words on the page to teach me to unlock those same words, for example Calvino writes, “But what enhanced for Kublai every event or piece of news reported by his inarticulate informer was the space that remained around it, a void not filled with words.” I often wondered how much of the story was written on the page and how much of it I was meant to bring to it as a reader. At the end of “Tamara,” Calvino writes, “However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs…you leave Tamara without having discovered it.” I finished the book as I left Tamara—not having discovered it.

Twice I have suggested that for me Calvino was speaking through Polo in this book. Perhaps it was the modern elements, perhaps it was the lack of emphasis on character development, but Polo did not present as a fully realized character as much as Kublai did. I enjoyed the way the conversations between Kublai and Polo framed the descriptions of the cities, although I kept looking for them to relate more closely to each other. Often I read hungrily to the next portion of dialogue.

This is one of those books that I think will percolate through my brain for quite some time. Invisible Cities reminded me that a reader will construct their own world out of whatever they are given and there is no need to be didactic about it unless I am purposefully so. While I as a reader (perhaps like Kublai) was expecting a more straightforward travelogue, because Calvino’s descriptions were compelling, I was willing to follow him as he described the essences of these cities (and therefore the essences of life) rather than their architecture.

If this review made you want to read the book, support indie booksellers (and reviewers—I get a commission) by picking up a copy of Invisible Citiesfrom Bookshop.org.

Pictures of The Emigrants in W.G. Sebald

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I started reading The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald with pictures on the brain. I knew the book included photographs and I was interested to see how the pictures interacted with the text. At first the images simply interrupt the text. There are never any captions although they are related to the surrounding text. The Aare glacier is mentioned on page 15 and a photograph of a glacier is on the facing page. The reader is left to make the determination of whether this photo represents the Aare glacier or the general idea of the glacier. Because I was in a critical frame of mind, I questioned the provenance of every photograph wondering whether the children pictured on page 39 were Sebald and his classmates.

I could not, however, stop the pictures from coloring my impressions of the book. When Sebald includes a picture of an agenda book on page 127, I wanted to believe it was Ambros’s agenda book. I wanted to pick it up and feel the cracked leather against my skin. When Sebald begins integrating descriptions of the photos or references to them into the text, the pictures naturally merge more fully with the story. This happens on page 71 when Sebald writes, “The photograph that follows here, for example, was taken in the Bronx in March 1939” and he goes on to name the people in the photograph.

What is most interesting about the photographs is that although I was wary of them throughout the book, on the very last page when Sebald describes a photograph from a Frankfurt exhibition, writing, “Behind the perpendicular frame of a loom sit three young women, perhaps aged twenty….Who the young women are I do not know,” I wanted desperately to see that picture. I had begun to take for granted the photographic “evidence” peppered throughout the text and when he describes most fully and tantalizingly this one photo, I wanted to see it.

I am still undecided as to whether or not to use images in my own text. I am suspicious that I want to fall back on pictures to make the story feel more true. Until I can find a better reason, I think I may omit them.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Emigrants from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.