Review: Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It is quite telling of George Orwell's great writing that a novel not widely regarded anywhere near his best can be such an interesting read.

Gordon Comstock, 30 and moth-eaten already, decides to revolt on the money world and quit a "good job" according to society's standards in favor of a struggling poet's life. Orwell's unflinching prose as always, full of sharp wit, stinging humour, and fresh images, never compromises and repeatedly shocks and hits you in the face. Descriptions of Gordon's family (whose members lived and died without a real stab at life) and friends are so vivid that you almost see the characters before you, and while Gordon is the main character throughout the whole book, the other characters were so well-painted that it's very hard to think they were not based on real characters. Ravelston, a wealthy publisher of a left-wing magazine, who wore the uniform of the moneyed intelligentsia and had a perpetually apologetic look on his face, is a good example. And again, as in other Orwell's works, there is no celebration of honest poverty, as might be the case with other writers writing from the privilege of their upper or upper-middle class comforts.

The novel, certainly not Orwell's best, could have done with some trimming. After brilliant opening chapters, full of brilliant descriptions, misanthropic observations, and sharp criticism of advertising industry and money-world in general, the rest was a continuation on the same theme; a re-iteration of what the main character and the supporting ones thought and felt, which remained very much the same until a great final chapter.

What really stands out for me is how relevant this fiction work, written more than 80 years ago, is to today's life, and maybe to the foreseeable future. We come across similar sentiments towards modern day capitalism, towards modern day emptiness, and more or less the same alternatives are suggested. When today's politics and economics are discussed, many of us seem to be under the impression that today's questions are a mere product of our modern day but Gordon Comstock's story is probably relevant to a lot more people in past, present, and future than we might think.

View all my reviews

Personality of the year 2015

In the Spanish fiction novel, Soldiers of Salamis, during his search for the details of an old incident from the times of the Spanish Civil War, the narrator tries to define what a hero is. He reached different definitions, according to all of them, and pretty much any other definition I ever heard or thought of, Khaled Al-Asaad, the 83-year-old Syrian archaeologist who first refused to flee the ancient city of Palmyra after it was lost to ISIS, then refused to reveal to ISIS militants the whereabouts of ancient artefacts that had been moved for safekeeping, and was tortured then beheaded publicly for that, is a true hero, and is the personality of the year 2015 for me.

In a world where people everywhere increasingly tend to sell their arses for a meager payrise or promotion, this man didn't find that even his life was big enough a prize for selling himself and what he believed in. He's dead anyway now; no award or accolade would do him any good, but it might make our world a little bit better by showing us all, particularly the younger ones among us who might still be able to change, that there might be something in life worth living and fighting for, and worth dying for.

You'd normally expect more media coverage; something to set an example to look up to, but it seems that there's a much bigger interest in headlines that sell and get web traffic than anything else, even from the highbrow media outlets, and the news about an 83 years old history professor hardly sells. Where a story takes place probably plays a part as well; an exact story happening somewhere like in France could've made a much bigger impact.

Personally, I find two particularly sad thoughts about this. The first is that even if his heroics got the recognition they deserve, it will make absolutely no difference whatsoever to him now that he ceases to exist and has no idea what happened later on. The second is whether his sacrifice was even worth it at all in today's increasingly idiotic world where a picture of a celebrity's bare ass breaks the Internet. It seems to me that his sacrifice in the grand scheme of things only helps Asian tourists take better selfies with authentic artefacts in the background. I honestly don't suppose Palmyra's history and culture play that big role in as many peoples' lives as we'd like to think, and in any case if somebody else knows where the artefacts are hidden, they will probably, under enough pressure and torture, give them away to be destroyed like the rest of the city or sell them at a high price, otherwise no one will be able to find them anytime soon. They'll most probably end up eventually in a museum somewhere shown to bored schoolboys and selfie-takers, glancing for a second at the plaques, completely unaware of the price paid for what's before their eyes.

Review: Down Under

Down Under by Bill Bryson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An enjoyable and informative read. Admittedly, I had known very little about Australia before I started reading this book so the book served as a good introduction and hence my 4-stars rating rather than 3. In comparison with "Notes From a Small Island" that I read some years back, I think it's much better. Possibly because of my prior ignorance. Despite my initial predisposition, there were some interesting historical events from many perspectives; Burke and Wills disastrous yet celebrated expeditions in the desert, celebrated bushrangers like Ned Kelly, the outrageous atrocities committed against the natives and how it had never been a concern for a long time, the Stolen Generations, the Gold Rush, Lambing Flat riots and White Australia Policy, the unappreciated tales of the aviator Kingsford Smith, Whitlam's Labor government of 1972 and how it was dissolved. I'll let my favorite highlights speak for themselves. They range between facts and jokes, and I hope they can tell you something you didn't know or raise an eyebrow (in case you're not that knowledgeable about this part of the world), or at least put a smile on your face:

- Eighty per cent of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exists nowhere else. 

- Of the sites that qualify for World Heritage status, only thirteen satisfy all four of UNESCO’s criteria for listing, and of these thirteen special places, four – almost a third – are to be found in Australia. 

- The country has less than 1 per cent of the world’s population but more than 20 per cent of its slot machines. 

- In the early days a commercial flight from London involved, in addition to nerves of steel, forty-two refuelling stops, up to five changes of aircraft and a train journey through Italy because Mussolini wouldn’t allow flights through Italian air space. It took twelve days. 

- No other nation lost more men as a proportion of population in the First World War than Australia ... The casualty rate for its soldiers was 65 per cent. And all were volunteers.’ 

- The Simpson Desert, an area bigger than some European countries, was named in 19321 after a manufacturer of washing machines. 

- Until 1949 there was no such thing as Australian citizenship. People born in Australia were not in any technical sense Australians at all but Britons – as British as if they were from Cornwall or Scotland. 

- The historian Alan Moorehead once wrote: ‘Australians of my generation grew up in a world apart. Until we went abroad we had never seen a beautiful building, hardly ever heard a foreign language spoken, or been to a well-acted play, or eaten a reasonably sophisticated meal, or listened to a good orchestra.’ 

- One thing you won’t find much in Australian second-hand bookshops are 1950s or earlier editions of lots of books – The Catcher in the Rye, A Farewell to Arms, Animal Farm, Peyton Place, Another Country, Brave New World and hundreds and hundreds of others. The reason for this is simple: they were banned. Altogether, at its peak, 5,000 titles were forbidden to be imported into the country.

- I should just note that in an Australian context ‘hotel’ can signify many things: a hotel, a pub, a hotel and pub – that stand on nearly every corner.(Something I personally found strange on my first few days in Australia)

- You do rather come away with two interlinked impressions – that Australians love to argue for argument’s sake and that basically they would rather just leave everything as it is. 

- During national referendums the citizens of the Northern Territory are also required to vote, but the votes don’t actually count towards anything. (I still need to check if that's still the case) 

- Had La Pérouse [the commander of a French expedition journey that reached Australia] been just a little faster, he could have claimed Australia for France and saved the country 200 years of English cooking. 

- In 1859 ... Thomas Austin... made a big mistake. He imported twenty-four wild rabbits from England and released them into the bush for sport. Within a couple of years they had entirely overrun Austin’s property and were spreading into neighbouring districts. Fifty million years of isolation had left Australia without a single predator or parasite able even to recognize rabbits, much less dine off them, and so they proliferated amazingly. 

On Convict Transportation: 

By the late eighteenth century Britain’s statute books were plump with capital offences; you could be hanged for any of 200 acts, including, notably, ‘impersonating an Egyptian’. In such circumstances, transportation was quite a merciful alternative. When they couldn’t fool their masters the prisoners could often fool their fellows. For years there existed an illicit commerce in which newly arrived convicts were sold maps showing them how to walk to China. 

On Sydney: 

- As late as 1953, there were just 800 hotel rooms in Syndey, barely enough for one medium-sized convention, and not a thing to do in the evenings; even the bars closed at 6 p.m. 

- In 1923, when the city burghers decided to throw a bridge across the harbour, they determined to build not just any bridge, but the longest single-arch span ever constructed... It took longer to construct than expected – almost ten years. Just before it was completed, in 1932, the Bayonne Bridge in New York quietly opened and was found to be 25 inches – 0.121 per cent – longer. 

- Lachlan Macquarie, a Scotsman who was governor of the colony in the first part of the nineteenth century, and whose principal achievements were the building of the Great Western Highway through the Blue Mountains, the popularizing of Australia as a name (before him the whole country was indifferently referred to as either New South Wales or Botany Bay) and the world’s first nearly successful attempt to name every object on a continent after himself. 

On Sydney Opera House: 

- The whole project had been intended to last no more than six years and construction in the end dragged on for almost a decade and a half. The final cost came in at a weighty $ 102 million, fourteen times the original estimate. 

On Canberra: 

- ‘I reckon if you were going to rank things for how much pleasure they give – you know? – Canberra would come somewhere below breaking your arm.’ 

- Lake Burley Griffin contains an engineering wonder (the wonder being why they bothered) called the Captain Cook Memorial Jet. 

On Cricket: - It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavours look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect... It is the only sport that incorporates meal breaks. It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect. It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as players (more if they are moderately restless). It is the only competitive activity of any type, other than perhaps baking, in which you can dress in white from head to toe and be as clean at the end of the day as you were at the beginning. 

- I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket was left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other. 

On Aborigines: 

- As recently as the early 1960s, as John Pilger notes, Queensland schools were using a textbook that likened Aborigines to ‘feral jungle creatures’. - In 1805, the acting judge-advocate for New South Wales... declared that Aborigines had not the discipline or mental capacity for courtroom proceedings; rather than plague the courts with their grievances, settlers were instructed to track down the offending natives and ‘inflict such punishment as they may merit’. 

On Alice Springs: 

- In 1954, when Alan Moorehead passed through, Alice’s only regular connection to the outside world was a weekly train from Adelaide. - Its arrival on Saturday evening was the biggest event in the life of the town. It brought mail, newspapers, new pictures for the cinema, long-awaited spare parts and whatever else couldn’t be acquired locally. Nearly the whole town turned out to see who got off and what was unloaded. 

On White Cliffs 

- ‘So when did you get electricity in White Cliffs?’ He thought for an instant. ‘Nineteen ninety-three.’ I thought I had misheard him. ‘When?’ ‘Just about five years ago. We have telly now, too,’ he added suddenly and enthusiastically. ‘Got that two years ago.’

View all my reviews

Review: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



The Unbearable Lightness of Being can serve as a perfect argument in making the case for why reading literature is worthwhile. With its immense richness, it can open one's understanding and appreciation of life to other dimensions. Heavy on philosophy and inner thoughts, interjections of characters' lives with side historical stories, old legends, and even classical music, the book is a profoundly absorbing and encompassing reading experience. A book about metaphors, burdens, lightness, vertigo, decisions, es muss sein's. About grand marches, bulrush baskets, bowler hats, half-buried crows, tombstones, misunderstanding, and whether or not the fifth repetition of human history would be less bloody.


Following the stories of four main characters against the backdrop of despotic Communist regime and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, that heavily influenced even the events that took place elsewhere, the narration jumps back and forth in time from the different perspectives of characters using the voice of an omniscient narrator who repeatedly broke the fourth wall and directly addressed the reader. The story progress is slow as the main emphasis and attraction here is on the characters' depth and the reflections and philosophy surrounding each turning point, driving the main story calmly towards an ending where weightless and acceptance conquered lightness and rebellion, and even though Kundera gives away the ending of the main story less than halfway through (if it can be called an ending, as every single human eventually dies), the book never fails to impress in any way afterwards.


Naturally, a reader can relate to one character and storyline more than the rest, but all of them were thoroughly convincing. And while the inner thoughts of characters were all intriguing, the disillusion of many characters against communism as well as the endless revolutionaries was remarkable for me. At some point, one of characters, Sabina, expresses an important idea:

She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand.

The narrator express a similar thought:

But the people who struggle against what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. They, too, need certainties and simple truths to make the multitudes understand, to provoke collective tears.

And I can't find in my recent memory a sadder, more poignant passage than this one, where peoples' lives after death are boiled down to a single statement or inscription that not just fails to describe them, but also misrepresents them altogether:

What remains of the dying population of Cambodia?
One large photograph of an American actress holding an Asian child in her arms.
What remains of Tomas?
An inscription reading: HE WANTED THE KINGDOM OF GOD ON EARTH.
What remains of Beethoven? A frown, an improbable mane, and a somber voice intoning "Es muss sein!"
What remains of Franz?
An inscription reading: A RETURN AFTER LONG WANDERINGS.
And so on and so forth.

A much recommended read, and for the first time I will be looking forward to the film adaptation. Adaptations of such huge works of literature are often disappointing, and the characters and sets are invariably different, even slightly, from what the reader pictured in mind, but I am interested in finding out how the filmmakers relayed the characters' inner thoughts, and looking forwards to the beautiful film locations in Prague and Geneva as well as the integration of Beethoven's symphony that weighed heavily over the entire book:
Beethoven- Op. 135 IV



View all my reviews

The Cut -- An impressive journey, but less impressive film

Faith Akin's epic tale of hope and survival, set in the time of the Armenian Genocide amidst the Great War and the resulting diaspora all over the world. I watched 'The Cut' lately during the London Film Festival, and found it worth the time in general and definitely had its good moments. It did not go for over-sentimentality and didacticism but rather showed an impressive journey of search and survival. For me, the wide shots in the desert and in the streets of Cuba were special, and there was very good work with costumes and set decoration. Some might argue that Armenians and Turks speaking English felt unnatural but it was totally justified for me. 

However, the film fell short in several aspects, and during viewing I constantly had the feeling that much more could have been done with the powerful story that could have greatly enriched and added more depth to the end-product. The poor screenplay dialogue was the most obvious shortcoming in the film, and while its over-simplicity can be regarded by some as appealing minimalism, it remained a huge disappointment. One scene epitomised the problem here, when the protagonist discovered that his daughters were still alive, his friend shouted exuberantly with no more than "This is good .. this is good ". It is possible here that using the English language presented a problem. The contrived ending was, to a lesser extent, irritating as well but the slow camera work saved it. I found a particular scene very interesting, when the Turks were evacuating the Syrian city and a Turkish boy got injured by a thrown stone, and the protagonist's reaction, and I wish there were more of these side stories, like watching Chaplin's 'The Kid'.

In addition to screenplay, several techniques could have added more to the story; exposition by flashbacks at different parts of the journey (some dreams were deployed but to a limited effect), voice- overs contemplating the condition of humanity at the time of war. A good soundtrack could have made a big difference as well, and in such a film I think dispensing of such a poor soundtrack altogether could have yielded a better result and added a minimalistic touch, although of course this would have been difficult with the protagonist speech handicap and the lack of a narrator. 

The challenging task for the main actor, to rely entirely on facial expressions and body gestures because of handicap early in the narrative, was met by a solid performance, but could be easily overlooked by general audience because of the shortcomings of the other narration elements.

An impressive story of survival, and a very important yet overlooked subject in recent history compared with others of even less scale, but less impressive film. The beautiful shots and powerful story were not enough to elevate it to the epic legendary status, but it is still worth watching.

Review: Homage to Catalonia and Looking Back on the Spanish War

Homage to Catalonia and Looking Back on the Spanish War by George Orwell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan”

Orwell's disillusioned account of his six months in Spain, when he volunteered to fight with the government forces during the Spanish civil war, a time when "the rights and wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple" before they seized to be, had Orwell’s salient captivating style of writing with the vivid descriptions of conditions at the front; fighting the cold and lice in the trenches during the long stationary warfare and the lack of food and ammunition, in addition to his eye-opening account of war propaganda, and partisan politics and inner-fight that plagued the Republican cause during that war.


Over the years, one of Orwell's traits for me as a thinker was his ability to bravely alter his views with new experiences, whenever they prove to be wrong or inaccurate, and what stood out for me in this book is how it drips with honesty and sincerity. Orwell is not ashamed of admitting his mistakes and misjudgements, he rather courageously highlights them. He even warns about his own partisanship in writing. It takes a lot of courage to do so and it makes it easier for the reader to unite with Orwell and see that world with his eyes. Because of that, as well as the superb writing style, I found the memoirs deeply informative and insightful, and successfully conveying the mood of those days; the surreal atmosphere in Barcelona in the early days (in a terrific first chapter), the unbelievable social equality between officers and privates in the classless militia system, how the cold was often worse than enemy, the telling little incidents at the front, the waning interest in the war in Barcelona few months later, and, superbly described, getting shot.


The Spanish civil war for me has been always fascinating and I've always felt it needed to be highlighted more, as a prequel to World war II and for representing almost all wars and struggles of the 20th century. We look back at this war with the advantage of hindsight, and some might be inclined to cynically criticise the simplicity of the raw emotions of that time but back then it was a true call to all idealists and poets to fight for a tangible cause for humanity, and even though 80 years have passed and humanity went a long way since then, it remains a lesson to dreamers and raw idealists out there, even though from personal experience, most people have to learn only through their own experiences even if they read all the books and memoirs in the world. The appendix is a must read for those who are not quite familiar with this part of history as it draws important lines to help understand what all those republican parties were about. It explains the difference between the different factions that formed the government forces and were dominated eventually by Communists supported by former USSR. Otherwise, it can be a quite intricate situation for the general reader to fathom.


Enjoying the book doesn't necessarily mean that one has to agree with all of Orwell’s views there. For instance, he was against what he called capitalist democracy remaining adamant that a working-class-run society is possible and worth fighting for, and he also found glamour in war despite all its atrocities. Many might not share the same views now, and even he, might have changed his views later on as he had done before. There is a risk of over-reading one of my favourite quotes in the book "It struck me that they were indistinguishable from ourselves", which might as well be a misquote out of context. I appreciated the book equally when reading it recently for the second time from a nearly opposite political standpoint from where I was when I first read it several years back, and I found that fascinating for such a heavily opinionated book like this one.


On a personal diversion, going back to my memories of the Egyptian uprising few years ago, some passages in particular resonated much more now than before. When Orwell says "How natural it all seemed then; how remote and improbable now!", or when he tells how in historic events physical details outweigh everything else and correct political analysis of the situation is often not made in the heat of these moments, while a statement like "the whole world was determined upon preventing revolution in Spain“ put a smile on my face; it seems a common attitude in all revolutionary movements.




View all my reviews

Maradona by Kusturica -- If Jesus stumbled, Why shouldn't I too?

Kusturica's Maradona certainly had its moments like the flashback montage during Maradona's drunken singing of "La Mano de Dios/Hand of God" with this family, and the egotistical comments from Maradona can be always entertaining. But there were way too much of Kusturica that ruined it for me; excerpts from his films and his mundane narration had a negative effect unless you're a massive fan of his works.

The irregular narration is more than justified; almost everyone knows who Maradona is and a chronological biography would have been quite boring. I think plunging head first into Maradona's world and Latin American revolutionary sentiment is the best way to get there. Yes Maradona is obviously egotistical and megalomaniac, and yes some of his political views can be easily refuted by a schoolboy but yet the mood can be quite entertaining, and let's be frank, if you were him, watch the film and tell me how can all of that surrounding madness from the outset, all the fan adulation not only in Argentina but arguably anywhere you go, not get into your head.

Worth watching but not a masterpiece, neither in documentary, or sport- documentary, or even Maradona-documentary.

Review: If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



A Tale of Two Reviews

After finishing the book, I looked up and searched deep in my memory to find if I ever read a book that I liked and enjoyed that much or if any of my previous reading experiences came even close to this one. Most, if not all, other fiction books would pale in comparison with this book. It can be argued that it has everything a reader would hope to find in a fiction work and I think I'll have a tough time picking the next fiction book to read where the narrative follows the ordinary well-trodden path that will probably feel boring now. One of the most solid 5-star rating I gave to a book.

It's a profound piece of work that can't be described without giving away the pleasure of experiencing it; maintaining the excitement and promise that comes with the expectation of the first sentence and prolonging them with such a skilful and creative way of writing, capturing the essence of reading pleasure along the way. A clever, thought-provoking, and witty book about books, reading, and writing. For most of the time, I would raise my head for few minutes every couple of sentences to think about what I read and link it to my past experiences and pleasures or conjure future stories, I thoroughly enjoyed savouring and chewing it slowly, and I think most readers would do, given the right mood and frame-of-mind.

I haven't seen many myself so I'm trying to look into other cases where second person narrative was used, but this one was almost perfect, and keeping its momentum for that long required such a mastery of the art that propels Calvino to the shortlist of top creative writers in modern age, though sometimes a reader might find it difficult to yield to the wit of the writer. I can't help but think as well about who Calvino is; is he Flannery, or is he Marana? Sometimes I think he got the best of both.

However, I can also understand this review, by another me, in a different place and time:

I think I will never fathom how on earth could a writer pull such a lazy stunt of literary nothingness; sometimes I have to raise my hands in the air and admit that some things are beyond me. A fiction where nothing happens but nonetheless carries on for 260 odd pages and some readers, somehow, manage to finish it. I wonder as well how can any reader keep going on with the type of lazy second person narrative that shows such a condescension and self-absorption.

Can't any writer fill pages and pages with something like:
"I can write a review or I may decide not to. If I write someone might read it and another one might skim through the lines and others decide to do without it altogether. You, reader, might love, like, hate, or loathe it, you might be reading it in the underground or sitting on a sofa or lying in a bed, on a computer, or phone, or .....", and so on inking pages and pages, wasting our time and adding to our frustration.

In addition to writing first chapters, playing around with contrasts and opposites here seems to be another obsession of the writer, but also an easy way of filling pages if the publishers keep ringing every day and you can't meet deadlines. It's easy; write something and its opposite then highlight the contrast and don't forget to add the deep contemplative touch.

Stay away from this experimental book, unless you have nothing better to do than wasting your time with a megalomaniac self-obsessed writer who thinks he's so smart when he sets everything to go in circles. I got the feeling at times that he wanted to capture the spirit of his character Marana and spoil the act of reading forever.

View all my reviews

Review: The Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



A brilliant novella, poignant and surreal, with many interpretations and comparisons to the modern human life with its feelings of alienation and estrangement.

A sensational first sentence, like that of his other novel 'The Trial', starts a terrific first chapter (out of three comprising the novella), where the protagonist deals with his predicament normally and with insistence on carrying on and going to work until he encounters the rejection and revulsion from others and starts to feel the shame and guilt.

It is a scary story as well. In a sense, anyone can be exposed to metamorphosis with different forms, severities, and abruptnesses. The simplest of which is what we all underwent, from being once children, then youths, men and women, and shortly elderlies, in addition to other life conditions and changes in views and personalities.

There are many ways to look at the story. On the first few pages it looked as if extreme working conditions with neglect to personal needs and diversions turn people, in a surreal way, into vermin and leads to their isolation. It can be thought of that the way the protagonist was treated was what turned him into a monster not the other way round. And unlike others, I can't find he family can be blamed either; it can be argued that it was merely an understanding problem because of the lack of communication. The different views and angles are a testimony to the brilliance of such timeless thought-provoking works.



View all my reviews

Review: Invisible Cities

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



POLO: Perhaps this garden exists only in the shadow of your lowered eyelids, and we have never stopped: you, from raising dust on the fields of battle; and I, from bargaining for sacks of pepper in distant bazaars. But each time we half-close our eyes, in the midst of the din and the throng, we are allowed to withdraw here, dressed in silk kimonos, to ponder what we are seeing and living, to draw conclusions, to contemplate from the distance.
KUBLAI: Perhaps this dialogue of ours is taking place between two beggars nicknamed Kublai Khan and Marco Polo; as they sift through a rubbish heap, piling up rusted flotsam, scraps of cloth, wastepaper, while drunk on the few sips of bad wine, they see all the treasure of the East shine around them.
POLO: Perhaps all that is left of the world is a wasteland covered with rubbish heaps, and the hanging garden of the Great Khan's palace. It is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which outside.



That’s a taste of what you’ll find in the poetic descriptions of imagined cities by Marco Polo and his conversations with Kublai Khan.



Only in Marco Polo's accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing.



Perhaps the most eccentric book I’ve ever read to date, and certainly the most difficult to describe. I really found it challenging at times to go through till the end and at some pointI thought I'll never do it. To be honest that was because of the magical descriptions of some cities that forced me to re-read over and over again and I seemed never to progress, which, thinking about it now, might not have been necessarily a bad thing.



Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man's place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else's present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
"Journeys to relive your past?" was the Khan's question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: "Journeys to recover your future?"
And Marco's answer was: "Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have."



I enjoyed it for most parts but maybe I'll appreciate it more in a different age, time, location, or state-of-mind. I generally blame the bustling London for my diminishing capability of tasting poetry and books of this nature, or probably I needed to find the substance Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, or rather Calvino, were smoking.



"And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced," Kublai said. "It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations."
"I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others," Marco answered. "It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real."



I must say though that I found some city descriptions to be just ludicrous and too gaudy and tacky by any means and with any state of mind, of course one doesn't expect all the poems in a book to be up to the same level or to taste all of them equally, but at some point I had to say this is absolute nonsense; The emperor has no clothes and all that glistens is not gold. But some other cities were just brilliant; Mauralia, the metropolis, formerly provincial city, is one of them:

Beware of saying to them that 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. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices' accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.



Descriptions of cities at times were descriptions of human emotions and experiences. Each city gives the readers something to think about, and some will resonate with their experience.



Chloe, Eutropia were memorable, as well as Baucis, Leandra. I found the cities of the dead to be particularly intriguing, my favourite of which is Adelma:

I thought: "You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask."
The stevedores climbed the steps in a line, bent beneath demijohns and barrels; their faces were hidden by sackcloth hoods; "Now they will straighten up and I will recognise them," I thought, with impatience and fear. But I could not take my eyes off them; if I turned my gaze just a little toward the crowd that crammed those narrow streets, I was assailed by unexpected faces, reappearing from far away, staring at me as if demanding recognition, as if to recognise me, as if they had already recognised me. Perhaps, for each of them, I also resembled someone who was dead. I had barely arrived at Adelma and I was already one of them, I had gone over to their side, absorbed in that kaleidoscope of eyes, wrinkles, grimaces.
I thought: "Perhaps Adelma is the city where you arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known. This means I, too, am dead." And I also thought: "This means the beyond is not happy."




A recommended read for the dreamers and poetry fans out there , but like other works of similar nature, it definitely needs a contemplating mood and a quiet location away from the city; maybe in the country or in a park, under a tent in the middle of wilderness or lying on a beach. Otherwise, in a bus for instance, it will sound ridiculous (or more ridiculous than it really is if you don’t like it)



Cecilia the continuous city, Olinda the city that grows in concentric circles were special. Irene as well:

If you saw it, standing in its midst, it would be a different city; Irene is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes.
For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is a city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.

Eusapia; another dead city

They say that this has not just now begun to happen: actually it was the dead who built the upper Eusapia, in the image of their city. They say that in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead.

Raissa, the unhappy city

Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.

Thekla:

If you ask "Why is Thekla's construction taking such a long time?" the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer "So that it's destruction cannot begin." And if asked whether they fear that, once the scaffoldings are removed, the city may begin to crumble and fall to pieces, they add hastily, in a whisper, "Not only the city."

Trude:

"You can resume your flight whenever you like," they said to me, "but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes."

And Perinthia; the city that was modelled following astronomer’s calculations:

Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters.



I re-read the book trying to contain it entirely in my mind. Reading it quickly, I thought, might present a better view; since patterns and are better discerned at a distance. Then a third time to extract my favourite parts, and started to realize it’s not nearly as bad as I might thought at times, and that I will probably revisit it again in the future, perhaps then I will be able to find the meanings that eluded me, or I’ll learn how to imagine clothes to put on the emperor’s naked body.



Kublai asks Marco, "When you return to the West, will you repeat to your people the same tales you tell me?"
"I speak and speak," Marco says, "but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of my return is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life, if I were taken prisoner by Genoese pirates and put in irons in the same cell with a writer of adventure stories. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear."



And a perfect ending

He said: "It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us."

And Polo said: "The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."



View all my reviews