Invisible Cities

An aging Kublai Khan asks his emissaries to bring him reports of the cities scattered across his vast empire, an empire he senses is crumbling. His favorite interlocutor is the young Venetian Marco Polo. Marco is a Scheherazade of travel reportage. Night after night he creates for the great emperor descriptions of cities each more fantastic, more impossible that than the one before. He speaks them into being.

This is a remarkable piece of writing, but I prefer two different Calvinos. There is the Calvino who wrote the early science fiction stories of Qfwqf, a space traveler who like Marco Polo is an intrepid explorer of other worlds. There is also the Calvino who translated Italian folktales and created his own wonder tales with The Baron in the Trees and The Cloven Viscount. With Invisible Cities Calvino creates exquisite dreamlike portraits of his locales, but for me the book comes most alive in its depiction of the young Venetian's relationship with the aging emperor.