Invisible Cities

There’s barely a plot here, Marco Polo describes a series of imagined cities to an aging Kublai Khan, and if you go in wanting characters and a throughline the way I usually do, I understand why some readers bounce off this hard. I almost did too, the first attempt, reading it front to back in one sitting like a normal novel and feeling it turn precious on me by city thirty.

The trick, and nobody tells you this going in, is that it’s not meant to be read that way. This is a collection of prose poems more than a novel, and once I started picking it up for ten minutes instead of an hour, letting one city sit before moving to the next, it opened up completely. Every city is technically a description of a place, but they’re really about perception and memory and the impossibility of describing anything to someone else exactly as you experienced it, and by the end you realize every city Marco Polo describes is some angle on the one city he actually knows, his own home, seen from a different distance each time.

The prose is doing the entire job here, there’s no plot machinery to fall back on if the sentences don’t land for you, so this lives or dies on whether Calvino’s images work on you personally. For me they worked completely, cities built on stilts over their own reflections, cities that exist only in the trash they’ve discarded, one built entirely from what its inhabitants desire and never get. I found myself rereading pages immediately after finishing them, which is not something I do with fiction, usually I want to know what happens next, and here what happens next matters less than what just happened sitting with you a little longer. It rewards rereading in a way that repays the slowness the format asks for, closer to poetry than prose and better for it.

Not for everyone, genuinely, if you need forward momentum this will frustrate you. For me this is one of the best things I’ve read this year, and I already know I’ll be back inside it before the year’s out.