Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino is a book to be savored. This little book packs so much more skill, style, and imagination into it's 160 pages, than most books twice its size. This book is a love letter to dreamers, to language lovers, and to writers. What is this book about? On the surface, this book chronicles a series of discussions between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. Kublai Khan, being ruler supreme, wants stories of all of the cities in his lands from merchants and traders who traverse his empire. Because Khan and Polo don't speak the same language, Polo must used objects to describe the cities he has been to. As a result we get descriptions of cities that defy the imagination.

 Each city is described within a page or two, in poetic fashion. This is one of my favorite passages:

Cities & The Dead 

What makes Argia different from other cities is that it has earth instead of air. The streets are completely filled with dirt, clay packs the rooms to the ceiling, on every stair another stairway is set in negative, over the roofs of the houses hang layers of rocky terrain like skies with clouds. We do not know if the inhabitants can move about the city, widening the worm tunnels and the crevices where roots twist: the dampness destroys people's bodies, and they have scant strength; everyone is better off remaining still, prone; anyway, it is dark. 

From up here, nothing of Argia can be sen; some say "It's down below there," and we can only believe them. The place is deserted. At night, putting your ear to the ground, you can sometimes hear a door slam. 

Ha! That last line kills me! Knowing that we are getting Khan's p.o.v., after it's been filtered a few times, I couldn't help but try and figure out what exactly Polo was describing. In the passage above, could he have been trying to describe a graveyard that was as big as a city?

I could go on and on, the English Major in me wants to come out. But, I want to keep this short and sweet, just like the book itself. I will say this book is for the literary fans out there. Good stuff.