Invisible Cities

This one I kept at the nurses’ station because the chapters are two pages, sometimes less, built exactly for the length of a lull between rigs. Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan about city after city he’s supposedly visited, and none of them behave like real places, one’s built on stilts over its own reflection, one repeats its own scenes with different actors playing the same parts forever. No plot to speak of. Doesn’t need one.

What got me is Kublai Khan sitting with an empty square on a chessboard near the end, and Polo unspools the whole history out of it, the grain of the wood, the tree it came from, the forest, the river by the forest, all the way back, out of nothing but blank inlay. That’s the move the entire book is making. Every city is really about Venice, Calvino admits it outright at some point, and by the last third you start to feel it, all these invented places are just angles on one place he can’t stop circling.

Read some of it out loud to a coworker on a dead Tuesday and she said it sounded like poetry more than prose, which tracks, there’s real rhythm in some of these, the memory-desire-signs one especially, felt built to be spoken rather than read silent. A couple people said this is the kind of book you shouldn’t binge, that it wants space between chapters to breathe, and I believe it, mine were forced gaps but I think I’d have wanted them anyway.

Five stars, though “stars” feels like the wrong unit for something this slippery. Short enough to survive interruption, strange enough that I’ll be back inside a year.