Journeys with Calvino - The Baron in the Trees and Invisible Cities by Joe

With Spring around the corner, it feels like a fitting time to discuss an author whose vivid descriptions of nature immerse the reader in worlds of rich foliage and expansive natural wonder. For me, the month of March is also a time for thinking about plans for Summer. The rare glimpse of sunshine and the moderate increase in temperature remind me that soon, venturing outside will once again be a pleasure rather than a battle against the elements. Summer is a time of exploring new places and experiencing the joy of nature, and the writer who, for me, ties these two feelings together perhaps better than anyone else is Italo Calvino (1923-1985).

Calvino was a Cuban-Italian postmodernist writer and chronicler of whimsical fables. He is the sort of novelist who will have you thinking “I have never read anything quite like that” after finishing any of his works. Like many authors, his writing developed over the course of his career as his motivations changed. The Baron in the Trees and Invisible Cities perhaps exemplify this ‘development’ more than any of his other books. While these stories contrast greatly in their writing style and purpose, they also share similarities in their fantastical elements, theme of exploration and their respective dream-like atmospheres.

Calvino’s parents were both botanists, and the family lived on an estate filled with vast forests and exotic flora. As a child, he would climb the trees with his brother and they would read their favourite adventure stories perched on the branches. Understanding this aspect of Calvino’s childhood helps to shed light on Calvino’s inspiration for Cosimo, the main protagonist of The Baron in the Trees, published in 1957. The story follows his life following his decision, at the age of twelve, to reject his comfortable upbringing within a noble family in eighteenth century Italy, deciding instead to spend the rest of his days living in the trees. This is a decision he takes very seriously, making a promise to himself and to everybody he knows that his feet will never again touch the ground.

There is a beauty in Cosimo’s outlook. A life amongst the trees is something that would understandably seem restrictive to most people, yet Cosimo quickly adapts to his surroundings, rapidly becoming more and more like the creatures he shares his green kingdom with. He finds himself mesmerised by a desire to explore his new world, and this gives Calvino an opportunity to enchant us with vivid descriptions of Cosimo’s canopy:

Cosimo sits under the pavillion of leaves, he sees the sun shining through their veins, the green fruit slowly swelling, he smells the latex oozing in the neck of the stems. The fig makes you its own, saturates you with its sticky liquid, with the buzzing of the wasps; after a while it seemed to Cosimo that he was becoming a fig himself, and, growing uneasy, he left.

Cosimo’s treetop realm becomes an extension of himself, and simultaneously Cosimo is a living, breathing accessory to the branches and leaves and insects that he shares his space with.

The duality between people and their lived environment would be a theme that Calvino would continue to explore over his career. Fastforwarding fifteen years to the publication of Invisible Cities (1972), we see how Calvino remains fascinated by the relationship between humankind and the (this time urban) environments we choose to construct and dwell in. Now, Calvino interrogates this theme in a more experimental, postmodern style. Invisible Cities differs from The Baron in the Trees as Calvino now requires the reader to suspend their disbelief and open up their imagination to imagery that cannot be experienced in day-to-day life. The Baron in the Trees invited readers to join Cosimo on an adventure into the canopies, but Invisible Cities invites the reader to join Marco Polo on an adventure into the unthinkable. Gore Vidal said of Invisible Cities:

Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvellous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant

The book is a deconstruction of The Travels of Marco Polo, published in around 1300, which documented Polo’s travels through Asia between 1271 and 1295 and his experiences at the court of Kublai Khan, who was the founder and first emperor of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty of China. Within Invisible Cities, Calvino flips the historical narrative on its head. Polo’s accounts of Asia dazzled thirteenth century Europeans with tales of alternative customs, unimaginable landscapes and unicorns, but here we have Polo dazzling a Chinese emperor with his own fantastical accounts of his homeland:

Now I will tell you how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. There is a precipe between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks… Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; farther down you can glimpse the chasm’s bed. This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as passage and as support.

The Baron in the Trees and Invisible Cities summon similar feelings within the reader: childlike wonder and a fascination with exploration, but these feelings are evoked in different ways. Cosimo immerses himself in his new world by climbing from tree to tree and building his new life amongst the branches, whereas Marco Polo’s interactions with the ‘cities’ he describes are more detached. He is an observer whose interactions with the world he’s describing remind me of an old-world explorer peering out to untouched lands through a telescope.

Invisible Cities is a book to be read, and reread again and again. Marco Polo’s depictions are so rich in imagery and extravagance that a reader must resign themselves to the knowledge that they cannot truly conjure up a ‘realistic’ image of each city in their mind’s eye. Personally, as a reader who likes to seek out stories with surreal and ethereal elements, I find that I tend to describe many of my favourite books as ‘dreamlike’ or ‘unreal’ when other descriptors might be more appropriate. However, Invisible Cities truly is a work of illusory wonder like no other:

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or grey or black-and-white according to trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass through them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.

Both The Baron in the Trees and Invisible Cities have an impressive ability to conjure up vivid images in the reader’s mind of the worlds being described. Whether its the teeming flora of The Baron in the Trees or the transcendental Borgesian ‘cities’ of Invisible Cities, Calvino has a talent for creating dreamlike landscapes. While The Baron in the Trees feels like a dream you would never want to wake from, Invisible Cities evokes dreams of a different kind; unreal, inexplicable, mind-altering.

If, like me, the approach of Spring has got you thinking ahead to the Summer months, you may wish to consider packing a Calvino in your hand-luggage. The Baron in the Trees, a fairytale for adults, might appeal more if you want a book that finds the wonder in the Earth around us, or you may wish to choose Invisible Cities and join Calvino on a journey into the impossible.