Chessboard & Cornucopia:
40 Years of Invisible Cities.

Heading south and east, with your back to the sea, the city of Alvito draws you uphill along ever-smaller roads, tightening spirals and switchbacks that soon have you confused over what's the approach and what the close-clustered town itself. Around just which curb-hugging rise and turn did you finally arrive? Nothing so defines this metropolis as its precipitousness...

The above concerns an actual place, about an hour outside of Rome, a "city" insofar as that's defined by culture and close living quarters. The style of my description, however, the parody I'm attempting — respectfully — that's what Americans will recognize before they think of any Italian reality. It's the style of Invisible Cities, of the cities within Cities.

Fifty-five thumbnails, the longest a few pages, the shortest half a page, take up most of Italo Calvino's slim text and supply its defining innovation. Indeed, their bulk proves part of the innovation. Plenty of writers had set fictions in fantasy downtowns, but none had dreamed up so many at once. One metropolis in the 1974 novel comes alive as a memory of young love; another presents faces of the unhappy dead. One hangs in hammocks, another stands on stalks, another contains a museum of its own ideal forms, forever perfect, and another remains eternally unfinished, nothing but abandoned plumbing. Each miniature is rendered with improbable specificity, in bits and pieces now exotic, now mundane. Each brings off a small tale of discovery, a bracing single shot of narrative.

Sets of ten cities open and close the book, and these bracket seven sets of five, but enclosing the whole there's another sort of bracket. There's a sketch of a story connecting the city sketches. Marco Polo, footloose merchant, shares his travels with the stay-at-home emperor Kublai Khan. This frame device turns out to be itself about framing, since the Khan seeks a better sense of his domains: "to discern," as the novel's opening has it, "through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing." This premise alone sets Invisible Cities far beyond ordinary storytelling. Still, nothing's so striking as the cities themselves, a Baedeker unparalleled in its variety, forever playing peekaboo with pattern: now you see one, now you don't.

And this game has continued for 40 years. First publication came at the end of 1972, and hardly 18 months later arrived the English translation, the pinnacle of William Weaver's career, scrupulous yet songlike. By the end of the first print run American novelists as far apart as John Barth and Gore Vidal were hailing Calvino as an international grandmaster, beside the likes of Grass, Naipaul, or Garcia Marquez.

Those reputations, however, are based in the tradition of the social novel. A House for Mr. Biswas, for instance, generates story out of well-known tensions. It's about race, colonialism, and money-grubbing, and its primary task to embody a place and a people. Cities, on the other hand, tends to disembody. Merchant and emperor do without psychological backing and filling...