Невидимые города

1972 novel by Italo Calvino
the novel by Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities is a novel by Italian writer Italo Calvino. It was published in Italy in 1972 by Giulio Einaudi Editore.

The book is framed as a conversation between the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, and Marco Polo. The majority of the book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 fictitious cities that are narrated by Polo, many of which can be read as commentary on culture, language, time, memory, death, or human experience generally. Short dialogues between Kublai and Polo are interspersed every five to ten cities discussing the same topics. These interludes between the two characters are no less poetically constructed than the cities, and form a framing device that plays with the natural complexity of language and stories. In the middle of the book, Kublai asks about a city Polo never mentioned, his hometown of Venice. Polo replied "Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice."

Invisible Cities deconstructs an archetypal example of the travel literature genre, The Travels of Marco Polo, which depicts the eponymous Venetian merchant's journey across Asia and in Yuan China (Mongol Empire). The original 13th century travelogue shares with Calvino's novel the brief, often fantastic accounts of the cities Polo claimed to have visited, along with descriptions of the city's inhabitants, notable imports and exports, and stories by Polo about the region. Invisible Cities is an example of Calvino's use of combinatory literature, and shows influences of semiotics and structuralism. In the novel, the reader finds themselves playing a game with the author, wherein they must find the patterns hidden in the book. The book has nine chapters, but there are also hidden divisions within the book: each of the 55 cities belongs to one of eleven thematic groups (explained below). The reader can therefore play with the book's structure, and choose to follow one group or another, rather than reading the book in chronological chapters. At a 1983 conference held at Columbia University, Calvino himself stated that there is no definite end to Invisible Cities because "this book was made as a polyhedron, and it has conclusions everywhere, written along all of its edges."

The book was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1975.

Invisible Cities (and in particular the chapters about Isidora, Armilla, and Adelma) is the basis for an opera by composer Christopher Cerrone, first produced by The Industry in October 2013 as an experimental production at Union Station in Los Angeles. In this site specific production directed by Yuval Sharon, the performers, including eleven musicians, eight singers, and eight dancers, were located in (or moved through) different parts of the train station, while the station remained open and operating as usual. The performance could be heard by about 200 audience members, who wore wireless headphones and were allowed to move through the station at will. An audio recording of the opera was released in November 2014. The opera was named a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music.