Calvino scholar Peter Washington maintains that "Invisible Cities" is "impossible to classify in formal terms." But the novel can be loosely described as an exploration-sometimes playful, sometimes melancholy-of the powers of the imagination, of the fate of human culture, and of the elusive nature of storytelling itself. And even though some of the cities that Polo evokes for the aging Kublai are futuristic communities or physical impossibilities, it is equally difficult to argue that "Invisible Cities" is a typical work of fantasy, science fiction, or even magical realism. To amend this, listen to Polo’s observation, “it is not the voice that commands the story it is the ear.Although Calvino uses historical personages for his main characters, this dreamlike novel does not really belong to the historical fiction genre. Within the cohesive empire, the utopian ideal of the cities remains unachieved - whether aimed through the ontological set-up of Plato’s Ideal City in The Republic, or down the centuries, when Calvino sat to write about the cities, which could not be validated. Khan’s aspiration to systematically bracket Polo’s accounts echoes the political realities. At every step, Polo defeats the purpose of the frames and questions its boundaries that refrain him from putting the blocks together. To have a better understanding of Polo’s narration, Khan deploys - chessboard and atlas - as the predetermined tools to lend a structure to Polo’s commentary.
Inevitably, it barred me from reading the book under the lens of political empire and sovereign logics. Under the current context, while rereading the text, I was taken by surprise that in the past, I had been caught within the poetic-philosophy framework of the cities. Largely, the text’s liminal position between modern and postmodern forms catches the attention of the readers and critic alike. Even the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge has dedicated a long poem Kubla Khan to the ‘slight disposition’ of the emperor of the Tartars who ruled as far as the regions of current day EuroAsia.Įarly sailing ship for voyages of discovery Image Credit: Courtesy of Creative Commons
Even if the cities documented in the book are as fantastical as the Be'er Sheva, the travel accounts of the real-time Italian explorer Marco Polo and Kublai Khan’s court were made popular in the 13th century Italian Renaissance with a travelogue The Travels of Marco Polo written down by Rustichello da Pisa and Polo. The second part holds true for this book - with less than 150 pages it would force you to take long pauses before turning a page and often even moving to the next paragraph to understand the meaning of the unsaid ‘between the lines’. If the cover of the book does not affirm the quality of the book, then the number of pages is nowhere the yardstick to measure the intensity of the read. My first encounter of the bond between these two countries came with the two protagonists - Venetian traveller Marco Polo and the Tartars emperor Kublai Khan - of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, published in 1972. Book cover of Invisible Cities Image Credit: Courtesy of the author
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