the last book I read

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.

There's a Gore Vidal quote on the back of my Vintage edition of this book which says:

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

Well that's this book review fucked. I'll plough on anyway, though. As always Gore is being a bit hyperbolic for effect but, as always, he's got a point. You're not about to get, for instance, anything much in the way of a description of plot, because there barely is one. Basically Marco Polo and Kublai Khan are sitting in a palace garden, shooting the shit as Mongol emperors and Venetian merchants do, and Polo tells Kublai Khan a series of brief stories, each one a brief description (a page or two at most) of a city, supposedly one that Polo has visited on his travels, but all clearly imaginary; cities slung on ropes across chasms, cities of ghosts, watery cities, cities periodically torn up and rebuilt elsewhere, cities overrun by their own garbage.

And the point of all this? Well, to divert, provoke and entertain, of course, but also to illustrate aspects common to every city like, mundanely, what do you do with all the dead people and rubbish? Polo is also describing aspects of one particular city - his distant home, Venice. It's like a novel-length version of the TS Eliot quotation:

We must never cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.

This being Calvino there are also some post-modern structural games being played here - just as with Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual (a much longer book similarly constructed from short loosely-related episodes with a framing device holding it all together) you can ignore all this if you want to without losing anything much. The authorial dicking about is certainly less intrusive than it is in the other Calvino I've read, If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, though I recommend both books highly. At 148 pages (with a lot of white space for all the chapter breaks) it's very short, and it's not like there's any plot to remember, just a series of little tasty delights to dip into to freshen the palate after the great big beefy main course that preceded it.