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Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
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Invisible Cities (edition 1974)

by Italo Calvino (Author)

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9,334205836 (4.14)1 / 379
Poetically written novella featuring an imagined conversation between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. It is atmospheric. Some “cities” are places that sound wonderful – a place to go visit, while others are dilapidated and unpleasant. The cities described by Marco Polo turn out to be specific aspects of a singular city. I treated it as a meditation, reading it in small bits and pieces, and re-reading segments. This is my preferred type of experimental fiction. The language flows beautifully. It is not anything like a traditional story, but I enjoyed it. ( )
  Castlelass | Oct 30, 2022 |
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You can read this story by the Italian fabulist Calvino on two different levels. Ostensibly a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in which the adventurer describes 55 cities he has visited in the empire to the emperor, you can try to focus on the unique physical aspect of each city as described. This is interesting and has led to many different artists creating visual interpretations of the cities as described in the book. But that's not really what the book is about.

Each description of a city, 1-3 pages long each, takes one facet of the human experience and makes it the defining feature of that city. In Chloe, everyone is a stranger, no one ever greets anyone with recognition, and at each encounter with another person, one imagines a thousand different possibilities unfolding before quickly looking away. Perenthia was laid out in design to reflect the perfection of the firmament, to create heaven and utopia on earth, but gives birth to monsters. Octavia is suspended from a net stretched across a void between two huge mountains, buildings held up by being tied to the net above; life is less uncertain in Octavia, as inhabitants know the net will last only so long. Valdrada was built above a reflective lake, so that nothing that happens in the above ground Valdrada does not also happen in the Valdrada of the lake, and the inhabitants are so aware of their copied image that they take no action without taking special care of how that copied image will look (this book was published in 1972, well before Instagram!).

Halfway through the book, Polo tells Kublai Khan that in describing each city he is really describing his home city of Venice, describing some aspect of that city. But he is also describing some aspect of humanity in each description of a city. As Kublai Khan tells him in one of the dialogues that are placed between descriptions of cities, "I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again." Polo replies, "Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name."

Humanity, in other words, is more similar than the differences suggested by maps and human constructions. More durable as well. Travelogues are interesting but what they tend to describe is not lasting. "Only in Marco Polo's accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing."

It's a hopeful vision. ( )
  lelandleslie | Feb 24, 2024 |
When Marco Polo first meets Kublai Khan they do not speak the same language. Of the many hundreds of languages in the Khan's empire they don't have even one in common. Instead Marco Polo uses a number of small objects to indicate certain ideas, and a dialogue using these symbols is born. Eventually the two of them develop a lingua franca of whatever words in common they pick up and their own mutual experience with each other. This communication is forever anchored around the initial experience with the objects.
"Each piece of information about a place recalled to the emperor’s mind that first gesture or object which Marco designated the place. The new fact received a meaning from that emblem and also added to the emblem a new meaning. Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms."
Guuuuuh that's so fucking rad. ( )
  ethorwitz | Jan 3, 2024 |
Only for those enchanted by Latin American 'magicians' - Borges, Rulfo, Coelho and the like.
  Den85 | Jan 3, 2024 |
I often feel that Calvino could have written about a slice of cheese and would have made it interesting. William Weaver's translation is superb (at least as far as reading experience goes--I have not/can not compare it to the original). The book is full of metaphor, but instead of feeling tedious, we start to understand the metaphors as truths and not just mere symbols. The context is a fictitious conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, the founder and first emperor of the Yuan dynasty of China, and the subject of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem. Rather than set it completely in dialogue, however, the book offers vignettes of these "invisible cities" to which Marco Polo has "traveled"--the scare quotes will have to suffice here as I do not wish to offer spoilers. Occasionally dialogue from Khan and Polo interject to wax philosophical, but it is far from gratuitous. For those new to Calvino's writing, it is a great entry! It did not take me ten years to read this book---I just started it on my Kindle ten years ago and put it aside for awhile. ( )
  rebcamuse | Dec 30, 2023 |
This is a wonderful daydreaming book. It's basically Calvino's interpretation of Marco Polo's telling the Kublai Khan of his travels around the world. These cities are magically places. I have often wondered if George Lucas read this before creating some of his cities in Star Wars. ( )
  KarenDeLucas | Nov 13, 2023 |
until I reached the end I still wasn't completely sure what I thought and then when I did I felt a strong sense of melancholy even though nothing sad had happened and a desire to read it all over again. the writing is really incredible - I'm usually awful at imagining things but somehow even the short descriptions of each place conjured up whole cities in my head - I felt totally immersed. each concept made me want to think on it more, to imagine it more completely. and each touches on important issues like death, history, justice, memory, meaning... all of it sparked ideas constantly and sometimes made me think of things in different ways. idk. it's hard to explain the feeling. it felt bittersweet, like a feeling of loss for these places which don't and can't exist. I liked it a lot ( )
  tombomp | Oct 31, 2023 |
This book is more of a thought experiment than a story. It reminded me very strongly of the book Einstein's Dreams, by Alan Lightman, which is a thought experiment about time, whereas Calvino's is about cities. Between the two I strongly prefer the former, although it's hard to say why. ( )
  blueskygreentrees | Jul 30, 2023 |
Invisible Cities is one of six entries for Italo Calvino (1923-1985) in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. The other five are

(Links on the titles are to Wikipedia.)

(1001 Books does not include The Complete Cosmicomics (1997), probably because it's not a novel, it's a collection of short stories, one of which I reviewed recently.)

The citation for Invisible Cities from 1001 Books says that:


[caption id="attachment_122897" align="alignright" width="106"] 1st Italian edition, 1972, Einaudi[/caption]

Invisible Cities is constructed as a series of imaginary travel anecdotes told to the Tartar emperor Kublai Khan by the Venetian explorer Marco Polo. Fifty-five prose pieces each describe a different fabulous city and each contains a conceptual or philosophical puzzle or enigma. Zemrude, for example, is a city that changes according to the mood of the beholder. It is divided into upper and lower parts, windowsills and fountains above gutters and wastepaper below. The upper world is known chiefly through the memory of those whose eyes now dwell on the lower. (1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, edited by Peter Boxall, 2006 Edition, Quintet Publishing 2006, p 632.)

But it was the article at Wikipedia that offered me a schematic way to read it...

Invisible Cities is structured in 9 chapters, each prefaced by a conversation between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, and followed by a coda where they reflect on the cities just described. Like Alexander the Great who could not maintain control of the lands he had conquered, the Khan is bothered from outset of the story that the size of his empire makes it impossible for him to know it all. The more it expands, the more it inevitably results in places too far from civilisation to be 'healed' and corruption is inevitable. So the Khan tends to be a bit testy, and Marco Polo has to walk a tightrope between maintaining his own intellectual authority and respect for the all-powerful ruler of a mighty empire. In Calvino's deconstruction of the travel literature genre, Marco Polo is not just a merchant-traveller or an entertainer, he is also a politician and philosopher, one who must always be one step ahead of the emperor. The mental atlas of the empire is eventually likened to a chess board and it is a duel that the emperor does not want to lose.

Like chess, a game of patterns, logic and strategy, the story is framed mathematically.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/07/26/invisible-cities-1972-by-italo-calvino-trans... ( )
  anzlitlovers | Jul 25, 2023 |
Absolutely fascinating. The book comprises of Marco Polo describing surreal, fantastic cities to Kublai Khan. That's the book.

This book really reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges, where each story is a puzzle, and looks to be the size of the puddle, but you dip your toe in, and it reveals the depth of the ocean. The description of each city was only a page long, two at the very most. Yet, each one felt so real, and often would have some sort of philosophical quandary, which would leave me thinking long after finishing.

This feels like a book that gets even better on rereads. ( )
  Andjhostet | Jul 4, 2023 |
Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.

Reading the “Text”

Invisible Cities is a text which is always ‘talking about itself,' and has often been called a meta-textual work - a reading explicitly invoked by the narrative. Stricto sensu the cities described do not exist – could not possibly exist – yet this statement of fact lies in tension with Calvino’s intention for the work. In his lifetime, Calvino has repudiated the critique of this work as a pure intellectual abstraction / commentary on ‘Structuralism.’ I concur this is not a work of theory (Calvino is not the eminent theoretician). The basis of this repudiation i.e. that Invisible Cities is a work concerning the ‘real world’ of ‘lived experience’ is something I will entertain in this piece. To substantiate this reading, it is necessary to demonstrate ‘the possibility of a possibility (existence),’ by proceeding in the opposite direction of the usual critique of the text. If we are to take Calvino seriously, we must also ‘take the joke seriously’ and do something few readers would ever contemplate: we must understand the invisible cities as possible actually-existing structures. From Calvino’s “meta-text” we will re-construct the “text” itself to produce/read the “text” which the work is ostensibly about. (What is the “text” of the living city which could be summarized into the “meta-text” Polo produces in the form of this novel? What is the sub-text within the text i.e. what is the kind of text which could be written by someone living in the “textual” city? How closely does the “sub-text” correspond to Calvino’s meta-textual summary of the text and what are the points of friction between these readings? Where is the “text” no longer possible? )

How to Read a City: to illustrate a point

Chloe; city of strangers imagining encounters with each other. A city which can only exist in fragments of spaces. Perhaps Chloe manifests on the sidewalk of the financial district, or as “luxury dissolved into the atmosphere” in the hyper-modern movement of “staring at your phone.” One can imagine living in the Foucauldian work-house in which intercourse is forbidden, but this is not the city we are presented. The sub-text i.e. the text written by a resident of this city is easy to imagine (the romantic novel). Polo is perceptive to appreciate a craving for connection, the sensibility of constantly imagining a thousand interactions. The “sub-text” closely mirrors Polo’s “meta-text” but neither captures the “text”. The kind of writing which exacerbates the sensation of divorce and alienation and/or craving for connection thrives most where these connections are omnipresent in real life and intentionally denied. In fact, the physical correspondence of the city of strangers is the one between “ex’s,” of the glance met but intentionally refused. Meanwhile the visiting observer is not astute enough to notice the frequent connections which are always denied between people on the street.

Eutropia; city of nomads moving between fixed structures. A city which can only exist for one person. A city where the most brutal totalitarianism is confused for lighthearted fancy; presented as a concerted decision to move between locations at the moment everyone is “fed up with life” and wants a new story (metaphor for reading books). But there are two kinds of people neglected from the meta-text, those who are not yet ready to leave, and those who have long since been fed up. In reality, every person is either one or the other, nobody is “ready” to go except the one person for whom it is exactly the right time. Likely there are many who are ‘forging ahead’ and are already establishing themselves in the next city before the council has made the decision to move. These are not included in the narrative as they proceed before Polo. The question is what retributive action is prescribed by the city council for these transgressions, and does it mirror the one inflicted by the gestapo when they discover those still hiding in the basements of their homes when the evacuation order has been given. The inclination of the citizen is in the dialectic between the desire for stasis (which repudiates forced movement) and the desire for a more rapid movement free of coercion (the gestapo has already co-opted the idea of revolution. The fanciful sub-text which corresponds to Calvino’s meta-text is produced in this city, but in the form of the propaganda leaflet (There is friction here). The other sub-text is circulating in the form of Sylvia Plath (hatred for life) Gerald Murnane (stasis) Gilles Deleuze ("more artifice") Walter Benjamin (the Messianic). Someone must have the patience to re-read and find the most appropriate cities to employ this method...

Calvino “Off the Rails”

The above exercise “opens” the text for us, perhaps only to enhance the appreciation of Invisible Cities with a writing exercise. It also allows us to recognize when Calvino goes “off the rails.” Where Calvino “closes” the text and abandons the connection to a cumbersome reality and becomes derailed (deranged). We enter the realm of base-less theory in these moments. Calvino’s “cities of the dead” – those filled up entirely with stone – are prima facie unimaginable as actually existing in the present tense. Everything then turns back upon ideas of narrative and writing (suitable construction for a writer who can only think about writing. Does everything turn back upon ideas of cheese for the cheesemonger?). Even deaths (and their cities) become metaphor for writing (the etiology is reversed). Try this exercise for yourself on some of the later passages.

Reading the Meta-Text

Philosophy appears to be a particularly weak link among writers of import (see Nabokov). (Analogous to Sontag’s critique that the best novelists are failed poets (also Nabokov)). The connection to the possibility of a recognizable reality is the root of Calvino’s strength in the text, although he is striving to get away from it all the time. Calvino’s philosophical ideas are most explicit in the abstracted conversation between Polo and Khan. The Idea here is the conception of language as the functional effects of felicitations between words. This establishes a brittle totalizing structure (Structuralism) which Calvino can subsequently repudiate to give the impression of a “complete” totality. (Trademark of Hermann Hesse)
"Contemplating the essential landscape [of the chessboard], Kublai reflected on the invisible order that sustains cities, on the rules that decreed how they rise, take shape […] and fall in ruins. At times he thought he was on the verge of discovering a coherent, harmonious system underlying the infinite deformities and discords […] Now Kublai Khan no longer had to send Marco Polo on distant expeditions: he kept him playing endless games of chess. Knowledge of the empire was hidden in the pattern drawn by the angular shifts of the knight, […] by the inexorable ups and downs of every game."

The structuralist notion of language as analogous to a game of chess already neglects the subtext of unrepresented signs which are in occult communication with the visible game and hold the key to interpreting any given collection of signs. E.g. In practice, Calvino’s chess language would never lead to an understanding of the function of ‘woke’ in the modern far-right discourse (‘woke’ can only be read as intelligible when substituted for n*****). But this is not unexpected; we have never gotten down to the level of the “text” in this novel (we have had to invent it ourselves); it follows that the theory that follows would be unable to perceive the “text” and the “sub-text” it implies. Calvino’s response to this conundrum is oblique:
“It was the game’s reason that eluded him. […] Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest […] was reduced to a square of planed wood. […] Then Marco Polo spoke: ‘[…] The square on which your enlightened gaze is fixed was cut from the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought: you see how its fibres are arranged? Here a barely hinted knot can be made out: a bud tried to burgeon on a premature spring day, but the night’s frost forced it to desist.’ The quantity of things that could be read in a little piece of smooth and empty wood overwhelmed Kublai; Polo was already talking about ebony forests, about rafts laden with logs that come down the rivers, of docks, of women at the windows …"

That the game neglects “real life” yet is in direct contact with it, is the planned response from the beginning, but this does not conclude the matter as Calvino would suggest. Once we have stepped away from the game to contemplate the chessboard itself, we are still at the level of meta-text which is a commentary on the descriptions of cities. We have not reached the “text” and we are not close to the “sub-text;” we have a metaphor pointing to another metaphor. Scraping mold off a cheese, you still only get to the surface of the cheese but not to the bottom of the cheese.
Now is as good a place as any to mention the prose, which is a kind of maximalist parenthetical fantasy writing, flowery in the pejorative sense. Calvino’s crimes of Prose have the same origin as his crimes of Theory: compulsive Variation. Here the commentary from our Magister Kierkegaard is relevant, “He does not limit himself […], but explains himself in more detail and dares to vary his language. Well, it is not as easy as one thinks to introduce variations. More than one student might have gotten High Honors if he had not introduced variations,” Calvino is always adding an extra word or turn of phrase at the end of a sentence, perhaps nice for first-time readers, but often this obfuscates his phrases:
“With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or its opposite, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires [… and fears.]”

So as not to appear banal, Calvino adds another noun to the ends of each sentence, but if we have learned anything from Deleuze, “fear” is already a kind of desire. Perhaps a minor critique of a minor variation, yet if we are to take ourselves to be the Lord of Hosts (not a stretch for Calvino’s prose), an unnecessary repetition (Moses striking the biblical stone) is enough to bar someone from the Promised Land (literary fame).

“Cities of Justice”

Calvino would like to return from the meta-narrative to “real life,” but the transition is not so easy. Perhaps one in one-hundred can make the “leap.” The penultimate presentation of Calvino’s grand vision of Justice, were it not couched in novelistic language, would be recognized as the insights you can get from reading essays of the undergraduate level:
"Having said this, [...] I must draw your attention to an intrinsic quality of this unjust city germinating secretly inside the secret just city: […] capable of reassembling a city still more just than it was before it became the vessel of injustice. But if you peer deeper into this new germ of justice you can discern a tiny spot that is spreading like the mounting tendency to impose what is just through what is unjust [...]"

Perhaps it would be equally meritorious (meretricious?) to argue that the impulse to effect justice by any means is the only true moment it possesses. The angel of justice is the retribution of injustice which defies speech (another failure of structuralism). The response to the holocaust is a justice which cannot even be put into words – any tortures enacted in the juridical context, however perverse, would be inadequate, therefore unjust. The biblical curse of ten generations is the closest we can get to putting these feelings to writing, but now one reads over these words and does not comprehend them. It is absurd that the innocents of subsequent generations should suffer the sins of the father, and even more absurd that the punishment should come to an end (this is infinite mercy in comparison with Damnation – a doctrine which is somehow taken lightly). And on the other hand, per Deleuze, “The guilty party escapes in the moment punishment is applied to the body and reifies a different person.” Even Calvino’s vision of Justice applied Justly is too heavy-handed. A more perfect punishment already anticipates this change and acts before it acts to capture the soul leaving the body. (I jest, but perhaps this is worth considering…) Calvino’s parting phrase is no less simplistic:
"And Polo said: ‘The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.’"

Again, Calvino proceeds too quickly along the rut, first by assuming that the Inferno can even be recognized – that one could perceive the Inferno even with the maximum exertional effort. This is the fault Adorno perceives in the “grimacer” who ”admits awfulness too readily and therefore denies it” (online commentariat take note). That the desire to be able to say even one true thing would arrive at the movement of recognizing the inferno, this is a movement which Calvino neglects. He also gets the dialectic wrong. It is impossible to accept the inferno - this is the most difficult thing of all. One is already part of the inferno from the start but is unable to perceive it. To “seek and learn” is perhaps the first step in this process, but the Variation at the end of the sentence is non-sequitur – nothing is “not inferno” (we return to the Immaculate Conception).

Short-Circuiting the Impossible

The critical moment of novel appears unexpectedly. Rather early in the text, just as Calvino is begins to go off the rails, just as the perceptive reader recognizes the text as impossible fiction, we are treated to a direct conversation:
"Your Cities do not exist" […]
and in an unexpected reversal the Khan begins describing cities he hasn't seen:
"Kublai interrupted him: ‘From now I shall describe the cities and you will tell me if they exist and are as I have conceived them. I shall begin by asking you about a city of stairs, exposed to the sirocco, on a half-moon bay. Now I shall list some of the wonders it contains. ‘Sire, […] the city [already exists].’
This is an interesting process. Ignoring the obvious interpretation (all imaginings put to writing already exist as writing), we perceive an idea for arriving at something true. If we accept that, as Calvino states, "signs form a language but not the one you think you know" and that "there is no language without deceit," then by negating a negation we can proceed toward a negative truth. The idea is moving backward, ejecting signs and signifiers, it knows from the start that every narrative, even and especially the true notes, are false. A false city in fiction which is aware of itself as false dares itself to be true by a kind of double negation. Proceeding from an intentional origin of falsehood, this is the Benjaminian “always start from a false position,” with the addition of Kierkegaard’s earnestness. The inferno (realm of falsehood), by necessity of its existence and our dwelling in it, is the condition for its own transcendence. “Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words […], actions […] and in what order and rhythm; […] gesture is enough;” ( )
  Joe.Olipo | Jun 4, 2023 |
Surrealism of the best kind. Story after story of rediculuous places, all of them fascinating. ( )
  mykl-s | Mar 2, 2023 |
I do not understand why anyone would enjoy reading this.
  rjdycus | Dec 19, 2022 |
From reading other reviews posted here (beautifully written many of them, but also very…well, vague) it’s clear no one has the faintest idea what this book is about. So I reckon my theory is as good as any.
    Invisible Cities is short (c. 100 pages of actual text), with no plot, action or characters to speak of. Ostensibly, Marco Polo is describing to the Tartar emperor Kublai Khan some of the bizarre cities he’s supposedly passed through on his travels. The lack of a story doesn’t bother me (I like that sort of thing) but I did find it surprisingly unimaginative, compared to Calvino’s own Cosmicomics say—if these really are just invented cities here, I could probably make a more imaginative job of that myself. So they’re meant to represent something else, and there are also plenty of broad hints that this isn’t to be taken too seriously either. For example, these “cities” all have female names (Esmeralda, Olivia, Dorothea) and some of the potted descriptions include modern things: refrigerators, bulldozers, radios.
    So what, looking back decades later, would someone like Marco Polo really remember most fondly about his travels? Towns and cities, sure, the landscapes too—dramatic mountain ranges, deserts and mighty rivers; he’d remember chieftains and emperors, stuffy unhelpful bureaucrats. But he was in the prime of his life (seventeen when he set off from Venice, forty-one when he returned), built like a boxing champion, but intelligent with it, cultured and very good looking. More, every town he passed through, across the entire width of Asia and back, he was the exotic-looking foreigner. Cities? That’s ridiculous. It’s the hundreds of women he met along the way he’d remember: energetic ones, puzzling ones, some he’s regretted leaving behind ever since, others he wishes he’d never met in the first place… (“A voluptuous vibration constantly stirs Chloe, the most chaste of cities…” “Many are the cities like Phyllis, which elude the gaze of all, except the man who catches them by surprise…” “Those who look down from the heights wonder if it would be pleasant or unpleasant to be in Irene that evening…”). Asia is seven thousand miles across—I’m surprised Polo had any energy left for travelling.
    One of the main features of Italo Calvino’s books is the humour, and the only real question with this one is of who exactly he was getting a rise out of. Us, his readers? Probably not. Historians then? Maybe. Or all those deadly earnest literary types who pore over his work and talk complete crap about it at dinner parties? Ah yes, warmer there I think. His books are beautifully written, and with genuine originality, but he was also the sort of author who found it impossible to keep a straight face, ever, and you take his writing seriously at your peril.
    And, okay, so my theory is a joke too (probably), but it does at least explain why, on his deathbed, Marco Polo himself is said to have remarked that he’d, “told only half of the things I’ve seen.” I bet. ( )
  justlurking | Nov 28, 2022 |
Poetically written novella featuring an imagined conversation between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. It is atmospheric. Some “cities” are places that sound wonderful – a place to go visit, while others are dilapidated and unpleasant. The cities described by Marco Polo turn out to be specific aspects of a singular city. I treated it as a meditation, reading it in small bits and pieces, and re-reading segments. This is my preferred type of experimental fiction. The language flows beautifully. It is not anything like a traditional story, but I enjoyed it. ( )
  Castlelass | Oct 30, 2022 |
A deeply thought-provoking book, although at times I find it a little uneven. Some chapters/cities are remarkably poignant and stick with me long after reading them, while others feel like pseudo-philosophy and ruminating for the sake of rumination. A few of them seem a bit repetitive, like Calvino was still trying to work out the best way to convey his ideas. I am left feeling like I read something deep and profound but only grasped a tiny bit of it. The writing is lyrical, with beautiful dream-like imagery; Calvino has a wonderful imagination. My favourites are probably the one where the men build a city to trap a dreamt of woman and the one where everyone in the city is a stranger. ( )
  serru | Oct 6, 2022 |
The description of this book is a series of conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, where Marco Polo describes the cities he's visited.

The book is mostly descriptions of cities - real cities, cities as they used to be or will be, imaginary cities, cities that have been dreamed. And the author makes the point repeatedly that what you experience in a city isn't really the city itself, but just a part of that city at that moment in time.

There are some jarring time shifts. Occasionally the author describes cities with trains and modern plumbing, electricity, and taking airplanes from city to city. He also includes LA and New York in the cities he describes. Surely not discussed by Marco Polo?

And really, really odd - interspersed through the book were interludes that seemed to pop out of nowhere: discussions of naked women taking baths,house ghosts who seem to be friendly until they're not, how once all the rats are gone the cities will be overrun with other creatures like unicorns and similar imaginary animals.

This book won some awards in the year it was published, so somebody liked it. Maybe I just missed the point of this book, maybe it's just not for me. ( )
  sriddell | Aug 6, 2022 |
Beautiful, like a set of prose poems, but also trance-inducingly repetitious. I feel that the context and circumstances under which one reads this book will greatly affect how it’s received. It would make a great book to read while traveling, or when visiting a city where one feels like a stranger. Alas, I’m too entrenched in my stolid, prosaic life at the moment to have been the reader this book deserves. ( )
  Charon07 | May 24, 2022 |
A book of superlative beauty, and short. A personal favourite of mine for many, many years; re-read after a considerable period. Fittingly, perhaps, I first heard of Calvino when I moved to a strange European city, and lived there alone in a grand house broken-down into tiny bedsits. There was a payphone on the landing two floors' up; Telecom Éireann has a poster on the wall above it quoting from Invisible Cities. Dublin then was truly a city with a literary spirit and maybe the rest of the country too. Somebody in its nationalised phone company had understood perfectly why lone souls might migrate to unknown cities, knew of a novel that expressed it with unparalleled elegance, and sought to promote both that book and a telephony service in the same advert. I bought the book and treasured it and forgot it and bought it again much later in life when I saw it in the bookshop of another European capital. I was frustrated, at first, by the blurb revealing that Marco Polo is revealing to Kublai Khan only one city. What a spoiler. But upon reading it again, the book is about so much more than that. It is a heady expansion of St Augustine's assertion that there is within each of us two cities (one formed by the earthly love of self, the other by the heavenly love of god); that there is instead and in fact a myriad number of invisible cities within all of us, an inevitable aspect of the human condition; rich inner worlds that allow us to breath and to grow or, paradoxically, that blinker and enslave us. The city and the human mind are echoes of each other.

I shall leave this city before the month is out. I am moving to the hills. I do not know if I will live in a city again or of I will want to. What chapters will open to me after my departure I cannot say, but Calvino and this book and some sum of my past experiences shall be with me always.

"...what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places." Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities. ( )
  Quickpint | May 23, 2022 |
Very well written nonsense. ( )
  eatonphil | May 8, 2022 |
Calvino never fails to delight. I shall be reading this one for the rest of my life. Sort of out there, like all Calvino, but still very tangible, with lots of good tidbits to mull over concerning life. It's hard to describe Calvino, he's so precisely vague, so substantially ethereal. ( )
  invisiblecityzen | Mar 13, 2022 |
Calvino never fails to delight. I shall be reading this one for the rest of my life. Sort of out there, like all Calvino, but still very tangible, with lots of good tidbits to mull over concerning life. It's hard to describe Calvino, he's so precisely vague, so substantially ethereal. ( )
  invisiblecityzen | Mar 13, 2022 |
Interesting, I must say! ( )
  nonames | Jan 14, 2022 |
This is a dense and fascinating book and while it is complicated on many levels, there are at least three themes that stood out for me: first, the nature of power and the cycle of life, death and rebirth; the illusion of happiness; and the power of language; second, the theme of travel being the source of imagination; and third, the theme of self-discovery.

Marco Polo tells tales of places he's been to the Great Khan, who at first takes them literally. Only later does he begin to suspect there's more to the stories, and the reader begins to do the same. The cities are dreams, or at least imagined landscapes, and recognizing this is the key to that third-level theme, self-discovery. If the tales are all imagined, they must tell us something about Marco Polo, which must tell us something about ourselves. Once we understand this, the purpose of the book becomes clear. It's a meditation on humanity. It's all there, parables about political power, warnings about the use and abuse of language, lessons about time and the raising up of awareness and social conscience.
1 like ( )
  jwhenderson | Dec 16, 2021 |
Marco Polo tells Genghis Khan about various cities he's visited. Each city is in fact a little parable or thought provoking idea.
However it feels a bit of a cheat, other authors would have used these ideas as the basis for something greater.
Each little tableau is like a topic heading during a debate. With the arguments for both sides being left to the reader to invent. ( )
  wreade1872 | Nov 28, 2021 |
Qytetet e padukshme, më i bukuri i librave të Italo Calvinos, vërtit nëpër ajër ide, aluzione dhe zhbirime imagjinative marrafrymëse në çdo faqe të vetën. Çdo herë që kthehet prej udhëtimeve të veta, Marko Polo përshkruan Kublai Kanit qytetet që ka parë...
  BibliotekaFeniks | Nov 13, 2021 |
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