This is one of my all time favorite books. Soon I plan on using it as a seasoning for something I'd like to write, but at least one writing project will be ahead of it for now. I need to find my way back into the craft of writing things before I tackle things I really want to write.
This idea of empire and ruin I think is particularly poignant in a way that I never would have perceived on first reading. It's a book that rewards multiple readings. What an accomplishment.
I really enjoy surrealism in general and have since read a lot of Calvino, Borges, Lem etc. I actually think I found Italian Folktales first which was part of the great Pantheon Fairy Tale & Folklore Library that also includes American Indian Myths & Legends. I was starting to explore story telling in general at the time, but then took a fork towards computer work which I saw as the new creativity at the time. I'm returning to my roots now I guess as I start to think not about being a writer, but someone who writes. These old tales and folktales still fascinate me.
The premise. In his gardens at evening, an aging Kublai Khan listens to the young Venetian Marco Polo describe the cities of his empire. Polo's reports are 55 short prose poems, each a city that exists mostly as an idea: Zora, the perfect memory palace that withers because it is held still to be remembered; Despina, which looks like a ship to the camel driver and a camel to the sailor; Isaura, built over a hidden lake, whose people argue over whether the gods live in the depths or in the buckets that lift the water up. Between the cities, the two men talk, and their conversations slowly admit what the reader suspects: every city Polo describes may be Venice.
The structure. The cities fall into eleven series (memory, desire, signs, thin cities, trading cities, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuous cities, hidden cities), braided through nine parts in a strict pattern, so the book can be read straight through, by series, or opened anywhere.
Themes.
- Place and people make each other. A city is the relationships between its spaces and the lives lived in them, "like the lines of a hand."
- Memory, desire and loss. Cities are reached too late, remembered wrongly, or kept so perfectly they die.
- Signs and description. How much a city is its signboards and its descriptions, and what is left when you set them aside.
- Empire and ruin. The Khan's sense that his empire is "an endless, formless ruin," and the search for a pattern that might outlast it.
- The inferno of the living. The closing advice: learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure and give them space.
The premise and themes were drafted using an AI model.