The Worlds of Italo Calvino
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
> What explains the mutability of Marco Polo’s cities? A quarter of the way through the tales we learn that Marco Polo has no knowledge of Asian languages.
That's not it, I think. It's the fact that Marco Polo is bullshitting, and Kublai Khan knows it, and does not care. The whole point is that this guy is a borderline fraud, weaving tall tales, but no one cares because the stories are good. Its a comedic absurdist view, a mirror held up to fiction, basically asking, "who cares?"
Perhaps "Cosmicomics" is a better example of the author having a laugh.
I loved both tho.
Exactly. "So it goes."
I never quite thought Marco Polo was bullshitting, per se, but rather revealing aspects of a city (perhaps even the same exact city, or all cities, for that matter) that are otherwise left unexamined.
In one key exchange in the middle of the book, Kublai prods Polo to tell him of the one city he has never mentioned directly—his hometown. Polo's response: "Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice."
Or maybe better put: it's clearly not literally all about Venice, since the cities as described do not (and can not) exist. So why make it figuratively all about Venice?
Here’s a chart someone made: https://www.deviantart.com/monkeelino/art/Invisible-Cities-M...
Invisible cities is fundamentally postmodern. Calvino is constantly putting forward that he is writting about imaginary cities, which are both literrary tricks, conceptual allegories, references and products of the story teller own experience. This is true of all fiction but here it's laid bare.
In particular, I think it holds wisdom for how to live in this age. Everyone says, to the point of cliche, that institutions and information can't be trusted; all is uncertain; all is illusion; distrust sources. But this is no answer, in itself, for how to live. Instead, I often think of the last paragraph of Invisible Cities:
"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
“I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me, the last thing she had left behind. What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over.”
I can't bare the thought that I'll never be able to read it again for the first time and the thought paralyzes me. My mind, in denial, begs me to conclude, "If I never finish it, it will never end."
>Hence, whether we use the verb “read” or the verb “reread” is of little importance. Indeed, we may say:
>Every rereading of a classic is as much a voyage of discovery as the first reading.
> Every reading of a classic is in fact a rereading. Definition 4 may be considered a corollary of this next one:
> A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Folktales
He spent many years recording the oral traditions of several Italian regions, and he tells them well.
(If you read Italian or want to learn, the language of these tales is often simple and limited, and the stories are great! Unlike Victorian renditions of the Brothers Grimm...)
For the HN crowd, I recommend The Night Driver, a short story from T Zero. It is at once a human story about emotion as well as one about algorithmic communication on the particle level. It’s also oddly funny from the relatable absurdity.
Maybe that's what the author wants to tell us, a contrast between the two, but I feel like they could have done that in other ways than at my expense as their reader.