AUTHOR OF INVISIBLE CITIES DRIVER

Yet Calvino, contrary to Coleridge, achieves this dream quality by stripping down his language to bare essentials, a stylistic feature that he admired in Kafka, who, according to him, was “using a language so transparent that it reaches a hallucinatory level” (an interview with Alexander Stille, Saturday Review, March/April 1985). A fragment”) – the latter reference is the more relevant as the book, like Coleridge’s lyric, often has the quality of a dream or a drug-induced vision (and the two characters indeed smoke opium). The meeting, and the telling of the stories, bring to mind The Arabian Nights, and the name of Kublai Khan evokes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan (which carries the subtitle “Or, a vision in a dream. As Calvino puts it: “It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear”. But perhaps what really counts is the reader, the real addressee of the stories. The narrator and the listener are not flesh-and-blood men they are nebulous, elusive. The two did really meet (in Beijing, in 1266), but the reader quickly realises that historical facts are just a pretext for Calvino’s story. Literally, the book tells the story of the meeting between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan during which Polo describes to the curious Khan the cities that he had seen during his voyages.

AUTHOR OF INVISIBLE CITIES DRIVER

“When the camel driver sees, at the horizon of the tableland, the pinnacles of the skyscrapers come into view, the radar antennae, the white and red wind-socks flapping, the chimneys belching smoke, he thinks of a ship he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off, with the breeze already swelling the sails, not yet unfurled, or a steamboat with its boiler vibrating in the iron keel and he thinks of all the ports, the foreign merchandise the cranes unload on the docks, the taverns where crews of different flags break bottles over one another’s heads, the lighted, ground-floor windows, each with a woman combing her hair.” It is impossible to summarise it: in order to give the potential reader an idea about the book, one should quote a passage, yet it seems that no fragment can represent the whole (nevertheless, we must quote a passage anyway): Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972) is a book teeming with paradoxes: it is prose, but feels like poetry it is very erudite, you feel the author has swallowed a whole library, and you can hear echoes of other works, yet it possesses an astonishing lightness it is repetitive, yet it feels strangely fresh, indeed so dangerously alluring that you want to read it very slowly, in order not to finish it too quickly, not to overdose, as it is like a drug.

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Author of invisible cities