Invisible Cities

The idea of this book by Italo Calvino is that Marco Polo meets Kublai Khan (and actually they were contemporaries during the 1200s) and describes to him the cities he has visited; cities where the people worship the buckets and pulleys of a well, where everything is underground or high in the air, cities which contain the faces of the dead, or where everything is reflected and so the reflection is more important than the reality. Which is the meaning of these sketches, that the cities are invisible because they’re actually Venice, or not-Venice, or not-the city of the reader.

Definitely reminiscent of Borges, definitely both eerie and beautiful, and the sort of book where occasionally there’ll be an “ah-ha” moment; like the city where the unborn have their memorials and their worshippers like the graveyards of the dead, like the city of signs where only the sign is visible and perhaps there’s nothing there at all.