There are books that you read and forget, likewise there are books that you read and they get etched in your thoughts forever, Calvino’s book is one of them.
As you walk around unfamiliar places, you observe things that the locals ignore or don’t reflect on consideration anymore. Calvino takes the feeling to an extreme by making his cities as magical as possible, so you have a sense not only of the physical attributes but also more nebulous aspects, the vibe and the atmosphere that are so difficult to describe to other people.
To me, Calvino’s cities give the impression of being in between the dreaming stage and reality, and the way we bind them together to control the rhythm of time in our minds. Undesirable memories bear the heavy load of past actions and the feel of nostalgia that overwhelms opens the door to incomplete desires that translate right into a tangible future that we will never have.
How many times can we modify the past in our minds? How many times can we convey the dead back to life by thinking of them? But the memory does not come face forward, it surrounds you and often catches you in a deadly embrace and the reflected image may replace the original thought.
In the, amidst a labyrinthine maze of canals, ancient Gods of locals and foreigners clinging to the edge of upside down doors and black and white strings connecting relationships between residents of a spider-web city, I couldn’t resist the charm of Maurilia. It was the city where I eventually managed to relax my frustrated mind. The comfortable safety of its sepia postcards led me back to cozy evenings with my grandma when I used to go to her house after school, and she made tea with some delicious pastries. Calvino brought me to type these words here and now that render her precious presence more real than ever. While writing this I can virtually discover the sound of her voice in my head.
The cities that Calvino talks about are the places you must experience on your own, walk the streets, marvel at the architecture, the labyrinthine roads that never seem to end, look at the outline of houses by which they stand, cross the canals and continually seek to discover new places. As you walk around you can think about how cities are at the same time similar, yet amazingly different. It’s never clear what is real and what is not, what is the effect and cause, this is possibly part of the invisibility of the title.
At this point the more I think about the book the more I feel I have to re read it and then read it again. However, there is one thing I can definitely claim about “Invisible Cities” that it’s a vivid dream, which can be experienced and cant be described.