The Heart of the City

Well, I was going around Fully-Booked Store in Rockwell last night when I found JP's much-recommended Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino.

Outstanding.

I've been fascinated with speculative stories involving cities ever since I picked up China Mieville's novel, Perdido Street Station, and read about the city of New Crobuzon. Of course, this was helped by the discovery of a second-hand copy of Mary Gentle's Rats and Gargoyle and her version of a late-17th century Paris called The City at the Heart of the World.

From there, I searched for other books with the same motif. This is not the urban fantasy sub-genre popularized by fantasy writer Charles de Lint by incorporating ancient, mythic themes into a modern, metropolitan setting. Neither is this the New Weird movement which Mieville had been dubbed its leader.

Rather, I looked for stories that involved fantastical cities themselves: Samuel Delaney's search for mythical Neveryona in Neveryona or: The Tale of Signs and Cities; Brian Aldiss' version of an alternate Renaissance Italy known as Malacia in The Malacia Tapestry; Jeff Vandermeer's curious City of Saints and Madmen, which the city of Ambergris is also called; and Jeffrey Ford's the Well-Built City in The Physiognomy.

From a distance, I've also seen great cities and small, from Michael Moorcock's constantly dimension-drifting city of Tanelorn (from his Eternal Champion series) to John Marco's dark, cathedral-filled City of Nar (from the Tyrants and Kings trilogy though I never liked his books).

This fascination (or obsession?) is not surprising, I suppose. After all, who hasn't voiced a wish to see other cities in far off places?

Myself, I've done a bit of traveling, seeing the European cities of Amsterdam, Paris and London. Likewise, I've been to the Asian city-states of Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as the Australian cities of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. In the United States, I've only been to San Francisco for three days but it was enough.

For each and every city I've been to, I've gained an impression that each city is more than a megapolis of buildings and people, commerce and art, pleasure-centers and history. That is, this is the city as it is-- the beat of the living heart of a city.

I think this is what these writers have done and done exceptionally well: write a tale of a heart of a city beating within the heart of a story.

And that's why stories of this nature defeat travelogues of any kind every time. To know that you stand-- not in the middle of a place (this city you see with your eyes)-- but in the heart of a living thing.

And all you have to do is see the city with your mind.

(On a side note, a hotel located on the Balearic Island of Menorca in Spain has patterned a number of its rooms on locales in Calvino's cities-- just scroll down a bit.

A fascinating, eyebrow-raising notion indeed.)