Course:Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino book)
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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When I was in high school, I was in a creative writing program that allowed me to take a lot of writing courses, some of them very specific. My favorite teacher, who has already been mentioned in my article on “In A Station of the Metro,” put together a class called “La Dolce Vita” that focused on Italian literature, cinema, and food writing. We watched Fellini and read Dante’s Inferno; I’m also 99% sure we watched Moonstruck. And I think that was the class where we read Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.
Invisible Cities might be the first experimental novel I ever read. It follows Marco Polo as he recounts his journeys for the entertainment of Kublai Khan in the twilight of his empire. The structure of the book is inherently mathematical; the breakdown of chapter themes makes it look like a cascading MIDI score. Calvino himself said that the book was designed “as a polyhedron…it has conclusions everywhere, written along all of its edges.” At the same time, you can read it straight through as a “normal” book and still get so much out of it. Calvino, maybe more than any other experimental prose writer I’ve read, is a master of telling a structurally complex story that feels simple. His writing works because it’s full of heart and wit regardless, and he doesn’t let his structural experiments eclipse that. As someone who loves experimentation and often has to fight against the stiffness of their own writing voice, I admire him a lot for this.
I have such a vivid memory of reading the last page of this book. It was the end of the day, the sunlight relentless and tinged with smog. I was eating a tangerine; the oil coated my fingers and made them scrape unpleasantly on the paper. I’m not really sure why the end of this book made a whole classroom of 15-year-olds cry, or if that’s more a testament to my teacher or to Calvino, but there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. It stands out to me because he wasn’t writing about emotion on a human scale, but on the scale of a whole historical moment, a whole world; I think the book is about realizing you live on the precipice of empire, that it totally rules your life, and that you will have to find a way to keep living inside, and despite, that inferno. On the cusp of this realization in my own life, I was surprised to find expressed so beautifully and playfully something I’d only experienced up to then as an amorphous dread. I hadn’t known those things could even be approached in fiction or poetry before, much less with so much hope.
I briefly dated a terrible boy in 12th grade; I wanted to read him this book, but ended up dumping him first (go figure). My teacher said, “If you can’t read Calvino to him, he isn’t worth it.” Then I met my current partner, and I wanted to read them this book–but, in a Calvino-like twist of fate, they had already read it.