Invisible Cities- A review

Title: Invisible Cities
Author: Italo Calvino
My first thoughts on the book; Marco Polo has a vivid imagination.
This book simply put, entices, allures and sends the reader into a road trip of his own.

Kublai Khan, the great emperor of Tartars and Marco Polo, the foreign Venetian traveler share a special bond which is fuelled by not words, but charades. The traveler gives mystical accounts of his travels through dramatic gestures, expressions, sounds, enactments and his stunning display of souvenirs. Unlike other repertoires, he succeeds in evoking all the senses of his patronage; sight, sound, touch, smell and taste.
He leaves each of his accounts or cities open to interpretations and only chooses to gently guide your thoughts to imagine the whole.

“The connections between one element of the story and another were not always obvious to the emperor; the objects could have various meanings: a quiver filled with arrows could indicate the approach of war, or an abundance of game, or else an armourer's shop; an hourglass could mean time passing, or time past, or sand, or a place where hourglasses are made.”

While he closes a few doors, he opens several others which tease the reader’s mind and leave it spinning.

The author’s style of writing at a glance appears disconnected; each city is titled and can be read with a certain level of understanding without reading the book from page one. But once you begin reading it from first principles, you realize that there exists a common thread underlying the superficial disconnect.
Each city described has an inherent quality of surreal. Most defy logic and the norm. Cities like Armilla, Octavia, Isaura etc. conjure images with excellent graphic quality in the mind.
Cities of the dead, cities of the mute, cities under eternal construction, cities without walls, floors, roofs; the list is limitless and endless.
I personally connected with cities like Esmeralda with its crisscrossing, zigzagging network of waterways and roadways. Each day a different route; each route a different destination. The imagery was synonymous with that of life itself.
The descriptions of the cities are interrupted by the little tete a tete’s between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. Together they ponder about various aspects of life and governance and raise philosophical discussions.

This book is best served with a lazy afternoon, chilled ice-tea and an open mind. Maybe a hammock.