70 Books & arts The EconomistAugust 22nd 2020
L
ooking fora summer getaway? Try the
city of Isidora, “where the buildings
have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral
seashells”. Or perhaps Anastasia, famed for
its golden pheasant cooked “over fires of
seasoned cherry wood and sprinkled with
much sweet marjoram”, a place where
“your desires waken all at once and sur-
round you”. Seeking somewhere even more
adventurous? Consider Octavia, which is
built on ropes, chains and catwalks across a
void between two mountain peaks.
This fantastical itinerary awaits readers
of “Invisible Cities”, Italo Calvino’s master-
piece of 1972. Nominally a series of tales
that Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan, it is actu-
ally a collection of layered, labyrinthine
meditations on cities, memory, desire and
language. Conversations between the trav-
eller and the emperor frame 55 short prose-
poems, each describing one city and fol-
lowing a strict mathematical structure that
bears the hallmark of the avant-garde Ou-
lipo movement to which Calvino belonged.
All these cities are simultaneously visionsfrom Calvino’s imagination and versions
of Polo’s home town, the most splendid
city of all, Venice. “Memory’s images, once
they are fixed in words, are erased,” Polo
says (in William Weaver’s translation from
the Italian). “Perhaps I am afraid of losing
Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or per-
haps, speaking of other cities, I have al-
ready lost it, little by little.”
“Invisible Cities” is a short book but
should be savoured slowly, like an Aperol
spritz on Campo Santa Margherita at dusk.
Sip, sit, and let your perspective bend un-
der its spell. You need not go to a city in per-
son to visit it, the book shows. The richest
travels are those along the thoroughfares of
the mind—a welcome insight in this era of
trips not taken, sights not seen, back
streets not explored. Or as the Khan comes
to understand: “The empire is nothing but
a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.”
For Calvino’s cities are manifestations
of ideas, thought experiments in urban
form. In frenetic Thekla, construction nev-
er stops so that destruction can never be-
gin. Unhappy Raissa “contains a happy city
unaware of its own existence”. Over the
course of the book, the mood darkens, the
cities taking on the tones of a waning em-
pire. In Theodora, the penultimate stop,
humans have extinguished every other
species, down to the spiders and the rats.
Echoing Dante, the Khan sees his em-
pire devolving into an “infernal city”. But
the inferno of the living, Polo tells him, is
already here. He offers the Khan a bit of
timeless advice on how to escape its suffer-
ing: “The first [way] is easy for many: accept
the inferno and become such a part of it
that you can no longer see it,” he says. “The
second is risky and demands constant vigi-
lance and apprehension: seek and learn to
recognise who and what, in the midst of
the inferno, are not inferno, then make
them endure, give them space.” 7Visit Italo Calvino’s imaginary
cities—all of them versions of VeniceUrban mythsIn the mind’s eye
home
entertainmentT
he storiesDaisy Johnson tells are
at once heart-rending and hair-
raising. Her prose is elegantly emotion-
al; her plotting would make Shirley
Jackson, a master of upmarket horror,
proud. “Sisters”, her second novel, is a
gripping, if nightmare-inducing, tale.
July and September, the siblings of
the title, and their mother Sheela have
left Oxford for a remote rented house
on the Yorkshire moors, driven to a new
life by a shadowy event for which July
blames herself. That incident hovers
over the novel, adding a layer of men-
ace to the ominous atmosphere of the
family’s new home. Ominous, too, is
Sheela’s retreat to her bedroom; she
emerges only at night, otherwise leav-
ing her daughters to their own de-
vices—which, in practice, means leav-
ing September in charge of July.
Often, thrillers and horror stories
rely on conflicts between love and
danger. In “Sisters” the two are fused.
September and July adore each other. At
first their relationship seems their
saving grace, but it slowly modulates
from balm to threat. July loathes being
separated from her sister—which puts
her at constant risk, since September is
domineering to the point of violence,
extracting terrible oaths of loyalty and
goading July to self-harm.
Ms Johnson tells most of the story
from July’s perspective. When she
briefly switches to Sheela’s point of
view, it is no surprise to learn of the
“things the teachers said about [the
girls] at school: isolated, uninterested,
conjoined, young for their age, some-
times moved to great cruelty.” The
shock is discovering their real age.
The disjuncture between how old
they are and how old they seem builds
an uncanny kind of suspense: clearly,
something has gone very wrong. When
July finds a love interest, her feelings
are a relief. But they are also a force for
rupture and change. As her relation-
ship with September is strained, July
starts to remember the event that drove
them from Oxford. The revelation to
which Ms Johnson has stealthily pro-
gressed proves devastating. “Sisters” is
an ode to sisterly love—and a warning
of how destructive devotion can be.Unmoored
British fictionSisters.By Daisy Johnson. Riverhead
Books; 224 pages; $26. Jonathan
Cape; £14.99