Memory and Invisible Cities

Kirsten and I were sitting in the front patio this evening (afternoon at the beach, remembering or being reminded that the Pacific is not always so true to its name), when somehow Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities came up in conversation. Strange enough, given that yesterday my friend Nick had pointed me in the direction of his own blog; and though he hasn't written anything there in a long while, his last post was about Invisible Cities. Nick and I had both been struck by how closely Los Angeles seems to incarnate some of the fantastic cities of Calvino's work, but we left that conversation for another day.

But when the book came up between Kirsten and I, I ran to my bookshelf to pull out my dogeared copy. I bought the book in London the summer before I studied abroad, and it become one of my touchstones in the strange and moving semester that followed. I've come back to the book a couple of times since then - never as a novel, but always in bits and pieces, fragments - but have not picked it up in a while. Kirsten wanted to read the back cover, but I wanted to read to her (How in love with the sound of our own voice we sometimes are):
But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman's voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.

I wanted to let her know the secret of the book - which isn't so much a secret given that the Times Literary Supplement Review on the back of the book lets you know the same thing - namely, that all these cities are at once themselves and Venice. A later conversation between the Great Khan and Marco Polo turns on that issue. How, the Khan wants to know, is that you have described every city except for Venice? Polo replies that in every city he has said something about Venice. The Khan insists that Polo describe Venice as it is. Again, Polo demurs, saying:
"Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little."

Under that, in crooked writing, I had noted to myself: Memory in Pamuk's The Black Book - as a well that may be exhausted. Just striking to find that note, what with my recent work on Pamuk's Istanbul. Memory as a well that may be exhausted.

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