Word: calvino
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This is Italo Calvino's seventh novel and his third to be published in the United States, and it is a work at once beautifully expansive and delicately proportioned. Marco Polo's catalogue of cities comprises a collection of short, formulaic prose poems, interrupted at regular intervals by descriptions of the explorer's discourse with the emperor in his garden. The catalogue is itself carefully ordered, with the cities drawn in always-changing sequence from eleven categories: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and signs, thin cities, trading cities, cities and eyes, cities and names, cities and the dead...
This is a parable about language and about abstraction. For an instant Calvino confronts the reader with an impossibility--a notion of distinctness apart from any form or reality to be distinguished--which is a familiar part of language as a system of abstractions from the world. At the same time, it is a parable about distinctness itself, based on another impossibility: a total negation of distinctness. "But why, then," Marco Polo asks, "does the city exist? What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howl of wolves...
...shape of Calvino's parables is a constant. Each embodies some philosophical conceit, some paradox of perception or memory, and each finds form in a peculiar kind of physical description. The invisible cities bulge with imaginative and very specific detail: Chloe is peopled by "a girl twirling a parasol on her shoulder," "a woman in black, showing her full age, her eyes restless beneath her veil, her lips trembling," "a young man with white hair," and "two girls, twins, dressed in coral." In Eusapia, a city of the dead...
...even if Calvino's description is alive to the senses, it remains arbitrary and unreal. It is as though, even as Marco Polo describes fifty-five out of all the cities that ever were and ever will be, Calvino chooses his images out of an infinity of possibilities, all equally sharp, all equally life-like. And when he tells of murderers who "plunge the knife into the black veins of the neck and more clotted blood pours out the more they press the blade that slips between the tendons," it is only for the sake of allegory--vivid, but purely...
...Each of Calvino's parables comes from a single mold, and so do each of Marco Polo's cities. As the catalogue progresses, anachronisms begin to creep into the explorer's narrative, and his empire begins to expand outward in time as well as space. Kublai Kahn discovers this...