As I began reading Invisible Cities it soon came to my attention how Calvino makes order a key part to the understanding of the reading. You are presented with the option of reading the book from cover to cover or individualize each section such as Cities & Memories, and reading all those first. Mine was pretty straight forward: cover to cover.
"Leaving there and proceeding for three days towards the east, you reach Diomira..."
Here, the first city is being presented to us with a short description. As we continue on the text, Calvino's description introduces a whole new city called Isidora. How can we find a viable connection between these two? I realized as I continued reading through section one that it would be very hard to find any connection what so ever. This lead me to question the order in which I was reading the book. I skimmed into section two, lining up all the Cities & Desire, but to my surprise still there was no apparent meaning. No understanding beyond the literal text is present so its extremely confusing to find a relation between any of the cities mentioned above. I'll have to look at the text from a more figurative point of view to find a clear understanding of what this book is really about.
"The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age."
Here Calvino made a very interesting comparison which mentioned how the man reaches the perfect city but no as he imagined, being young. He's now an old man watching the world go by from what looked as perfection. Calvino makes a great comparison with a very troubling issue of life in which men work forever and are never able to enjoy there success. He definitely caught my attention there but the connections aren't here yet.
"The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age."
Here Calvino made a very interesting comparison which mentioned how the man reaches the perfect city but no as he imagined, being young. He's now an old man watching the world go by from what looked as perfection. Calvino makes a great comparison with a very troubling issue of life in which men work forever and are never able to enjoy there success. He definitely caught my attention there but the connections aren't here yet.
The book reminds somewhat to a movie by Guy Ritchie called Snatch. His technique focuses different plot lines to converge around one central story. At the end they all come together showing the viewer, with impecable perfection, what the whole movie is really about. I don't see Invisible Cities as a book were something like this will happen, but we'll just have to wait and see.
