![]() We are always losing something, but in Fedora they preserve it. It’s possible to look at this situation with regret I’ve often said that opportunity cost is always infinite, and Fedora is really the city of this principle. There are more possible futures than actual presents, but most of them are dead, yet more come into being at every moment. “When he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had been a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe” (32).Īside from the rather compelling idea of a museum full of lost potentials in glass globes, which one can wander around and contemplate, this is kind of mind-bending to think about. It’s really about the way that possible futures change from moment to moment and disappear as the present overtakes them. Or Fedora, which is probably the city that will stick in my mind the longest. This is dangerous too, of course, because it can also erase the things that the citizens of these cities would like to forget-in any case, I’m not convinced of the truth of this idea but I find it fascinating. It raises the question of what history means and what our relationship to it can be. This is a clever way of skewering nostalgia and those who claim that they can ground themselves in histories that they consider eminent or glorious. “… sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves” (30). ![]() Calvino considers the possibility of a total separation between cities and their histories: Maurilia, which looks back to a nostalgic past with which it has no real connection. Here are some of the cities I found intriguing: ![]() ![]() What’s needed, of course, is for Calvino to write it elegantly enough, and for his ideas to be engaging enough, for this to be worth reading. Perhaps that’s what I should be writing about in this post, but as I read, I was more engaged in the procession of city after city. The point is to think of the cities and what they mean, and the two characters exist only to provide hints as to why certain cities are grouped together. So, although the book masquerades as a travelogue, it is a fairly transparent pretense. The characters of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan spend a lot of time discussing whether they exist or not, eventually deciding that they probably don’t, and if they do, they may not be Kublai Khan and Marco Polo at all. Toward the end of the book, they take on an anachronistically modern character otherwise, they are mostly dreamlike and occasionally fantastic or possibly supernatural. Instead, the cities represent insights, or moods, or ways of seeing the world. The cities are not real ones, and no information is given about their location, their population, the buildings they might contain. The reader is not intended to take this seriously, however. The conceit is that Marco Polo is describing his travels to Kublai Khan, giving a short explanation of the essence of each city that he has seen. In any case, although it’s in prose, it reads like poetry. Maybe I just read it at the right moment. I really liked this one, though I’d say I enjoyed it more than any of his books I’ve read so far. I keep reading Italo Calvino books, and I often don’t feel like I like them as much as I should, and I’m not sure why. Author: Italo Calvino (translated by William Weaver)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |