“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.
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NEC's view
Invisible Cities is one of the most imaginative novels we have read. It offers descriptions of cities that are fantastical, fragmentary, and allegorical.
The cities themselves read like portals. Each one becomes a different lens, revealing what a society thinks is preferable, what it chooses to prioritize, and what it values. These choices are expressed in architecture, in how space is ordered, and in turn in how life is lived. We loved how Calvino makes this visible, how he shows that even the most seemingly whimsical description is also a reflection on culture, power, and possibility.
