Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (1972)

Marco Polo sits before Kublai Khan and describes the cities of an empire so vast the emperor will never see it: a place strung on a net above an abyss, a place built and rebuilt by men chasing the same vanished woman, a place whose dead are laid out underground in streets identical to the ones above. He speaks fifty-five of them, sorted into quiet categories, cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and the dead, and slowly the two aging men understand that the descriptions are not reports but confessions. Every city Polo conjures is made, the book knows, of someone's longing and someone's fear, which is to say of the same stuff as a dream. Pressed at last about the one city he never names, he answers that he has been speaking of it all along, that to describe any place is to say something about the one you have left behind. _Invisible Cities_ understands that we keep only what we can lose, and describe only what we are mourning.