# 38: Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Always keen to assign a genre to things I read, I am tempted to classify this as part magical realism and part post-modernism. I am not, in the least, sure that this is a correct assessment of the novel’s (or rather novella’s) genre. Invisible Cities is essentially a group of vignettes describing a series of cities, interspersed with a conversation taking place between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. After visiting various locations in Khan’s vast empire, Marco Polo brings stories of the places he has encountered to Khan. There are cities where houses don’t have walls and one can only distinguish them through the exposed pipes that hang suspended in the air. A cities has an identical copy of itself underground; after a while, no one can tell who’s alive and who’s dead. Polo’s initial tales, the reader learns, were full of gesticulation, objects, and emotions, as the traveller was not fluent in Khan’s language. His fluency gives way to the loss of imagination; as Polo becomes more comfortable with the language, Khan complains of the loss of his descriptions. One thing that is apparent throughout the novel: the cities are what we make of them.