Labyrinth is a word that's used several times in Emili Rosales's The Invisible City, and labyrinthine is an apt description of the story. This complex novel is one I appreciated on many levels, but I found it also to be a challenging read. Perhaps it was the fact that it has been translated from Spanish, or perhaps it is simply the style the author used to construct this literary thriller, but it's a story that requires careful attention and one I found I couldn't blithely set aside for a few days like I often do with other books. As a matter of fact when I did this, I realized I had completely lost the thread and had to start from the beginning. The second time I took notes! This is not meant to be off-putting, however. Rosales mixes history, art, political intrigue and just a dash of romance to create a rich, if weighty, read.
The story is divided into two parallel plotlines separated by some three hundred years that will converge and intersect and eventually merge at the end. At the heart of the story is a mystery, but then the story seemed filled with secrets and mysteries and people hiding behind thick facades. A centuries-old manuscript anonymously delivered to Emili Rossell, a Barcelona gallery owner, is the portal into 18th century Spain and Italy that sets the ball rolling. But I had better tell you about the Invisible City first, since for me that was one of the greatest and perhaps most important mysteries of the story.
"Sant Carles de la Ràpita constitutes a mystery within the failed projects of the Enlightenment. It was first designed to be a grand, new city, but at some point the project came to a halt, no one knows exactly why, and what was not yet a reality soon became a pile of ruins. These are the ruins where you and your friends played and scattered pigeons. Very little remains: a few urban traces of one part of the town; the enormous porticoed square along the lines of the Royal Seat of Aranjuez--just to give you an idea of the grandiose dimensions of the project--the canal which apparently never really got under way, the buildings by the port, the New Church, the magnificent, unfinished neoclassical temple..."
The Invisible City, or what remains of it anyway, is where Emili Rossell played when he was a boy. "We played among the ruins of a dream" he tells the reader. The Invisible City exists at least as much in the imagination as along the canal and abandoned quarry in Sant Carles. When King Charles III thought to move the capital to the Ebro Delta in the mid-1700s much planning went into the construction of the new city, though the reasons why it was never completed seem to have faded into history. For Emili and his friends the Invisible City was a place to explore on rainy days that proved too wet to play football. "A select few of us would would race to the Invisible City, where our screams and the sound of the ball ricocheting off the walls and columns echoed in the half-darkness creating a wild, cavernous scene." But time passes as do childhood games and it was all left behind and forgotten.
There are mysteries in Emili Rossell's family as well. Raised by his mother, grandfather and aunts he never knew his father. Although there was a certain affection held by his aunts and other other women of the town for him, he always felt a coldness, a sternness for those who closely surrounded him, which he never understood. And he was never told who paid for his expensive schooling when he went away to be educated. Some mysteries he's not interested in solving, however. Many years later when he's leading a successful life away from Sant Carles, he receives an envelope with no return address containing a manuscript written in Italian with the heading, Memoirs of the Invisible City, in fancy calligraphic writing and he's plunged once again into his childhood dreams of the ruined Invisible City.
The memoirs, written by an Italian architect, detail the rise and fall of King Charles's dream of a city to surpass all cities. Andrea Roselli was a young apprentice to a famous architect in Naples when King Charles decided to move his court back to Spain. Spanish King Charles, King also of Naples and Sicily had just undertaken his most ambitious project, a fine palace in the city of Naples. But he would now set his sights on the Italianization of Spanish cities. Never fond of Madrid he hopes to move his court to a new capital. And Andrea is chosen, along with perhaps the most famous painter of his day, Giambattista Tiepolo to return to Spain and work on the King's new projects. While Andrea designs the buildings of the new city, Tiepolo paints the works that will decorate the King's palace and religious buildings. Royal courts are known for their treachery and cutthroat dealings, and King Charles's court is no different. Plans are discarded, buildings are left to the forces of time and works of art forgotten and lost.
The Invisible City is an intricate story of the dreams of one man and how those dreams can fail, and the repercussions that are felt many, many generations later. Greed makes people do desperate things and those who are most trusted are often the ones who are most dishonest as both Emili Rossell and Andrea Roselli discover. This is one thriller that works more on an intellectual plane than a sensory one. My appreciation for it came from making connections and working out the various mysteries associated with the characters and unraveling their motivations. Once people and places were straight in my mind it was interesting to see the parallels between these two different societies. In the world of politics and art some things don't change much and affairs of the heart can be just as painful now as they were three hundred years ago.
I think my struggles with The Invisible City initially came from keeping track of the characters and how they were related. Narrated in first person by two different men and in two different centuries makes for a story that calls for cautious reading. Strangely I think I would enjoy it more the second time around as I now understand all the political and emotional motivations, however the more I think and write about it the more I admire Rosales's novel. Many thanks to Alma Books for passing along this challenging yet enjoyable book.