![]() Not consider this content professional or citable. Professionally written study guide by one of our staff editors. Providing this content as a courtesy until we can offer a Cosmicomics If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler Invisible Cities The Baron in the Trees The Castle of Crossed Destinies The Nonexistent Knight & the Cloven Viscount The Path to the Nest of Spiders. This strict adherence to a mathematical pattern is characteristic of the Oulipo literary group to which Calvino belonged. The same pattern is used in reverse in chapter 1 as the diagonal cascade of cities is born. In order that the cascade sequence terminate (the book of cities is not infinite!) Calvino, in chapter 9, truncates the diagonal cascades in steps: Laudomia through Raissa is a cascade of four cities, followed by cascades of three, two, and one, necessitating ten cities in the final chapter. These five-city cascades are displaced by one theme column to the right as one proceeds to the next chapter. Inner chapters (2-8 inclusive) have diagonal cascades of five cities (e.g. Equivalently, it is symmetric against 180 degree rotations about Baucis. The pattern of cities is symmetric with respect to inversion about that center. The matrix of cities has a central element (Baucis). Each column has five entries, rows only one, so there are fifty-five cities in all. The matrix of eleven column themes and fifty-five subchapters (ten rows in chapters 1 and 9, five in all others) shows some interesting properties. The descriptions of the cities lie between these two sections. In each of the nine chapters, there is an opening section and a closing section, narrating dialogues between the Khan and Marco. Invisible Cities is a collection of 55 short prose poems about fictitious cities, embedded in a conversation between Marco Polo and the aging Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, Founder of the Yuan Dynasty and thus emperor of China: Having conquered vast amounts of territories, the emperor feels a sense of emptiness, as he realizes he will not be able to. The table below lists the cities in order of appearance, along with the group they belong to: He moves back and forth between the groups, while moving down the list, in a rigorous mathematical structure. The cities are divided into eleven thematic groups of five each: Over the nine chapters, Marco describes a total of fifty-five cities, all women's names. Home Invisible Cities Wikipedia: Structure
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