Status
Available
Call number
Collections
Publication
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1978), 165 pages
Description
In Kublai Khan's garden, at sunset, the young Marco Polo diverts the aged emperor from his obsession with the impending end of his empire with tales of countless cities past, present, and future.
User reviews
LibraryThing member gonzobrarian
Though exceedingly short (166 pages), Invisible Cities by author Italo Calvino is so densely constructed that it takes just as long, if not longer to understand, much less even finish the book than it would normally with a three hundred page novel. Indeed, after finishing Calvino’s work I’m
But I think that sentiment speaks somewhat to the essence of the work itself. Briefly stated, Calvino’s work is based around the visitations between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, specifically their time spent in conversation about the cities Polo has traveled between in the great Khan’s empire. The Khan, you understand, needs his amusement.
But as we progress through each of Polo’s travels, we are increasingly forced to consider whether Polo is giving us the whole story, whether he actually has been to the distant places he so ably illustrates, whether they even exist at all. Fascinating is the interplay between Kublai Khan and Polo; was Calvino creating a dialogue among historical equals, or was Polo dangling a metaphorical carrot before the flummoxed Khan in an attempt to be clever or save his own skin?
Calvino, sadly no longer among us, equally confounds with his imagery in questioning just what exactly constitutes a city. His writing definitely fits the classification of fabulist lit, similar to magical realism, in which surreality takes center stage. It is a grand labyrinth, a philosophical conundrum that Calvino so artfully evokes.
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convinced I’ll have to read it again just to even be convinced that I even read it in the first place.But I think that sentiment speaks somewhat to the essence of the work itself. Briefly stated, Calvino’s work is based around the visitations between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, specifically their time spent in conversation about the cities Polo has traveled between in the great Khan’s empire. The Khan, you understand, needs his amusement.
But as we progress through each of Polo’s travels, we are increasingly forced to consider whether Polo is giving us the whole story, whether he actually has been to the distant places he so ably illustrates, whether they even exist at all. Fascinating is the interplay between Kublai Khan and Polo; was Calvino creating a dialogue among historical equals, or was Polo dangling a metaphorical carrot before the flummoxed Khan in an attempt to be clever or save his own skin?
Calvino, sadly no longer among us, equally confounds with his imagery in questioning just what exactly constitutes a city. His writing definitely fits the classification of fabulist lit, similar to magical realism, in which surreality takes center stage. It is a grand labyrinth, a philosophical conundrum that Calvino so artfully evokes.
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LibraryThing member DCArchitect
A gem of immaginative genius. Evocative recollections of fanciful and fantastic cities distilled into short, strikingly descriptive and dream-like prose photographs.
Loosen your ties to reality and let this book take you. Read it uncritically and let the scenery wash over you. There is no plot.
Loosen your ties to reality and let this book take you. Read it uncritically and let the scenery wash over you. There is no plot.
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There are no characters. This is a book about the intersection of reality, language, and the senses. It isn't to be missed. Show Less
LibraryThing member MeditationesMartini
For an aesthete and especially a synaesthete like me, this combination of, oh ... geometry and spice is as good as it gets. Wish I'd had this book when I was 15, when each page would've made me translucent or sent me tumbling into the distant past or fill my mouth with dirt or whatever (they still
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do, momentarily, like a flash, but strawberries of course don't taste as good anymore with age either, etc.), and when even the bevies of bathing beauties (and dancing girls, and milkmaids) would not have seemed excessive. It's a catalogue of wonders here. Show Less
LibraryThing member TheAmpersand
If you set out to write novel without any characters or plot, you might end up with something like Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities." It's fifty or so descriptions of imaginary cities tied together, more or less, by a frame tale describing the meeting between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. It's
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certainly imaginative and, in places, it's very beautiful: Calvino's writing is precise and his vocabulary seemingly boundless. It's easy to trace his obsessions: opposition, form and nothingness, signs and their meanings, the limits of language, the process of accretion and destruction, the long, slow cycles of history. Still, the lack of anything like a conventional plot makes it hard to really grab onto anything here. The author presents the reader with a series of beguiling concepts, enchanting images, and logical puzzles: "Invisible Cities" has sort of a "ViewMaster on acid" thing going on. But when it comes right down to it, the book is all setting: as with most post-everything lit, the whole enterprise often seems more clever than affecting. The most human element here seems to be the names of the cities themselves, as most of them seem to be named after women. Still, I'm not sure how much of the book I'll remember, what will stick with me and what won't, and, yes, I imagine that that's a proposition that Calvino himself might have enjoyed, or even intended. I can certainly see how this book might have had a profound influence on some modern fantasy authors, and I'm probably glad it exists, but I'm not sure that I enjoyed it. The book is, I'm sad to say, probably only readable because it's so short, and it might be one to savor at the pace of a chapter a day. I read in a rush for a book group, and that might have been a less-than-ideal situation. I'm glad that "Invisible Cities" exists, and it's likely that someone out there could make an argument that the book opened doors for the writers who followed Calvino. Next time, though, I'd actually like to see someone go through them. Show Less
LibraryThing member bragan
Ostensibly, this consists of a series of conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in which Polo describes to the Khan the cities he's encountered in his travels. But the descriptions are all abstract, dreamlike, metaphorical, and strange. There are cities that are not the same city when you
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arrive as when you leave, cities with mirror images that exist above or below or inside themselves, cities whose histories are endlessly cyclical, cities that are built entirely of symbols, or memories or desires. These descriptions aren't about cities as concrete objects so much as they are about the idea of cities, about human perceptions, about... Well, it's hard to always know exactly what they're about. Often the meaning is obscure, which can be slightly frustrating, but is also rather wonderful: this feels very much like the kind of book you can come back to over and over and always find some new insight in it. Show Less
LibraryThing member nosajeel
This is a hard book to rate. At its best, it is mesmerizing and unique. It creates an imaginative universe of imaginary cities like none you've ever pictured before. My favorite was a city that created a twin city of the dead underground, where they placed the skeletons in positions as if they were
These descriptions of cities are framed by a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan about these cities, a dialogue that is highly abstract and yet also feels completely real, like something Calvino discovered rather than created.
The downside of Invisible Cities is that, at least for me, it did not repay a reading from beginning to end, even one that I did relatively slowly over the course of a few weeks. I loved many individual parts, liked the impression of the whole, but never fully "understood" it as a unified work of fiction and often felt like flipping through some of the cities. So, at least for me, it is a book I plan to dip back into random chapters in the future rather than read from beginning to end.
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doing jobs, but then as the underground city started to slowly evolve the above-ground one mirrored it, until it became unclear which city was copying which and which was the primary one. Dozens and dozens of cities like these are depicted in prose poems generally of one to three pages.These descriptions of cities are framed by a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan about these cities, a dialogue that is highly abstract and yet also feels completely real, like something Calvino discovered rather than created.
The downside of Invisible Cities is that, at least for me, it did not repay a reading from beginning to end, even one that I did relatively slowly over the course of a few weeks. I loved many individual parts, liked the impression of the whole, but never fully "understood" it as a unified work of fiction and often felt like flipping through some of the cities. So, at least for me, it is a book I plan to dip back into random chapters in the future rather than read from beginning to end.
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LibraryThing member annbury
A strange and beautiful book, in which Marco Polo describes a series of cities to the emperor Kublai Kahn. The report of each city is very brief, and the reports are grouped by theme and in nine sets. Before and after each set, there is an interlude, describing the communication of Polo and the
At first the description of each city seems a single, short, fantastical tale. But taken together they become like a carillion that begins with one bell, then grows more complex as another bell and then another joins in, until the whole thing melds into patterns too intricate to analyze. The book is half way to poetry: I expect to read it again and again.
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Kahn. At first the description of each city seems a single, short, fantastical tale. But taken together they become like a carillion that begins with one bell, then grows more complex as another bell and then another joins in, until the whole thing melds into patterns too intricate to analyze. The book is half way to poetry: I expect to read it again and again.
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LibraryThing member Banoo
Marco Polo describes the many cities he's visited to Kublai Khan. Between the city descriptions Polo and Khan talk. This is Invisible Cities. If you're looking for story, if you're looking for character, if you're looking for lost symbols conjured up by a certain Brown... you won't find it here.
One day I hope to look up at the city of Baucis and wave.
'After a seven days' march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foliage.
There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.'
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You will find wonderful ideas and beautiful descriptions of cities and people. This was a little book that required a slow reading to enjoy the dense writing of Calvino.One day I hope to look up at the city of Baucis and wave.
'After a seven days' march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foliage.
There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.'
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LibraryThing member caerulius
My favorite book. This isn't about plot- it's a sort of meditation on reality. Marco Polo is describing to the great Kublai Khan all the cities in his empire; but they are not bound by traditional rules. The very nature of the "city" is questioned, and these cities are not all made of solid brick
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and mortar. They are chameleon cities, magic creations spun from a great storyteller. Little windows into existence itself. Show Less
LibraryThing member VeritysVeranda
Still my favorite Calvino work, despite the fact that I have only read two of them. Originally read as part of a literature class in college, I probably wouldn't have spotted the subtle pattern of the stories but at least the class didn't turn me off of the book. It did make me wonder at how much
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we talk about other places we have been to only to actually be talking about home. Show Less
LibraryThing member sometimeunderwater
Rich and dreamy, like eating a cake made only from icing.
LibraryThing member jasonlf
This is a hard book to rate. At its best, it is mesmerizing and unique. It creates an imaginative universe of imaginary cities like none you've ever pictured before. My favorite was a city that created a twin city of the dead underground, where they placed the skeletons in positions as if they were
These descriptions of cities are framed by a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan about these cities, a dialogue that is highly abstract and yet also feels completely real, like something Calvino discovered rather than created.
The downside of Invisible Cities is that, at least for me, it did not repay a reading from beginning to end, even one that I did relatively slowly over the course of a few weeks. I loved many individual parts, liked the impression of the whole, but never fully "understood" it as a unified work of fiction and often felt like flipping through some of the cities. So, at least for me, it is a book I plan to dip back into random chapters in the future rather than read from beginning to end.
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doing jobs, but then as the underground city started to slowly evolve the above-ground one mirrored it, until it became unclear which city was copying which and which was the primary one. Dozens and dozens of cities like these are depicted in prose poems generally of one to three pages.These descriptions of cities are framed by a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan about these cities, a dialogue that is highly abstract and yet also feels completely real, like something Calvino discovered rather than created.
The downside of Invisible Cities is that, at least for me, it did not repay a reading from beginning to end, even one that I did relatively slowly over the course of a few weeks. I loved many individual parts, liked the impression of the whole, but never fully "understood" it as a unified work of fiction and often felt like flipping through some of the cities. So, at least for me, it is a book I plan to dip back into random chapters in the future rather than read from beginning to end.
Show Less
LibraryThing member leslie.98
I think I read this at the wrong time in my life. I could appreciate the beautiful prose but only a few of the chapters spoke to me. Mostly I felt stupid as clearly there was some meaning that I was just not getting and didn't have the energy or interest to figure out.
LibraryThing member apartmentcarpet
I must be missing something, since everyone seems to love this book, but I just didn't get it. The chapters are fragmentary descriptions of fantastical cities. There is no plot or story at all. Just like word paintings, maybe. Except poems are much better ways to paint a word picture. This is a
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short book, but I have to admit that it is one of the few I gave up on and quit reading before I finished. Show Less
LibraryThing member oacevedo
After reading The Baron in the Trees, I was looking forward to reading Invisible Cities. Unfortunately, I did not find it as interesting. I felt that it was a silly and pointless text. Although I was captivated at first by the descriptions of the cities, it quickly wore off because I felt that
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Calvino wasn't taking us anywhere. We were just going in circles. This is no Arabian Nights, despite the use of having Marco Polo describe the cities to the Khan. I would say skip this book and try The Baron in the Trees or another of his works. Show Less
LibraryThing member VanishedOne
It may be that some commentators take Marco Polo too literally when he tells the Khan that ultimately all his reports of myriad cities and impressions of city life are accounts of one city, which is Venice: perhaps he professes to be speaking of one city alone because really he is speaking of city
Where the book finds its chief weakness is in having, as books do, to draw to a close; worse, it tries to draw a moral. Fortunately, neither its brevity nor modern transport and urban planning can compromise its fantastic visions of the ways in which the built environment can be inhabited and experienced.
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life, cosmopolitan experience, and, towards the end, the urban sprawl in the modern world; at times he seems even to lament the sameness of modern cities, and hint elegiacally at a former world in which cities more subtly mirrored and merged into one another. 'Venice' is a name for one window on a space on which, the book hints, there are many perspectives with many fitting names. The framing device half-dissolves as Polo and Kublai Khan wonder whether they truly exist in the Khan's garden, and anachronisms begin to make their presence felt: the Khan's armies are shoved offstage by the aeroplane that can hurry Polo from one urban somewhere to another. Where the book finds its chief weakness is in having, as books do, to draw to a close; worse, it tries to draw a moral. Fortunately, neither its brevity nor modern transport and urban planning can compromise its fantastic visions of the ways in which the built environment can be inhabited and experienced.
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LibraryThing member bokai
This book is extremely difficult to explain. I have been trying to come up with some way to explain its contents without simply cutting and pasting for weeks now, but the challenge is considerable.
Is Cities a travelogue? It is, after all, nothing but a collection of short two page descriptions of
Is Cities a riddle? The so called premise of the book might suggest that. Polo talks of all these myriad places, and the Khan slowly comes to the realization that Polo is not describing cities at all but is talking about something else entirely. However, riddles usually end when the secret is revealed, and the secret here is not the point.
What Invisible Cities most resembles in my mind is a collection of imaginative fables, where cities represent all manner of things and their description is a description of the humanity that has built them and lives in them. What I love most about this book is that it is a thinkers book, but at the same time it can be read solely for its imagination and whimsey as well.
The greatest strength of Invisible Cities is in its style, so here is a snippit:
"For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene."
You should pick this book up, read it, and decide for yourself what Marco Polo means by this.
Is Cities a travelogue? It is, after all, nothing but a collection of short two page descriptions of
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various cities that Marco Polo has visited while in the great Khan's empire. But none of these cities actually exist, and no traveling actually takes place. Polo and the Khan remain in the same garden, chatting, throughout the entirety of the book. Is Cities a riddle? The so called premise of the book might suggest that. Polo talks of all these myriad places, and the Khan slowly comes to the realization that Polo is not describing cities at all but is talking about something else entirely. However, riddles usually end when the secret is revealed, and the secret here is not the point.
What Invisible Cities most resembles in my mind is a collection of imaginative fables, where cities represent all manner of things and their description is a description of the humanity that has built them and lives in them. What I love most about this book is that it is a thinkers book, but at the same time it can be read solely for its imagination and whimsey as well.
The greatest strength of Invisible Cities is in its style, so here is a snippit:
"For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene."
You should pick this book up, read it, and decide for yourself what Marco Polo means by this.
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LibraryThing member fodroy
This is basically just short descriptions of cities that don't exist, but it's awesome. It reads like prose poetry.
LibraryThing member thorold
Marco Polo sits in an idyllic garden with Kublai Khan and spins him stories of exotic cities he has visited, in between sipping sherbet, playing chess, looking at old books, and reflecting on philosophy. A simple formula, but Calvino doesn't want us to take it literally: for one thing the cities
Calvino obviously wants to break the automatic presumption that narrative in a novel involves a progression through time, much as Perec did a few years later in La vie: mode d'emploi (or Cortázar a few years earlier in Rayuela). The cities exist in a different time from the conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, whilst both are arranged in nine chapters without any obvious progression from one to another. Calvino cautions us against putting extra weight on the words that happen to come at the end of the book, and invites us instead to start in the middle, if we feel like it. To confuse things further, the cities are given titles in groups like "Cities and memory"; "Cities and signs", etc., whose members are scattered across different chapters, as though those would give us other kinds of sequences to read in.
Of course, being Calvino, he also wants us to reflect on how the imagined cities relate to their descriptions by the imagined narrator and (presumably) real author, how they relate to the set of all possible imaginary cities (cf. Borges's library), and what they tell us about the role cities play in our own real and imaginative lives. And — crucially — he wants to amuse and dazzle us with his wit, paradoxes, and crystalline prose. This is a book you can get a lot of pleasure out of on an Arabian nights level, without ever consciously getting tangled up in literary theory. But the philosophical vaulting horse and parallel bars are set up for you as well in case you want to use them.
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often have surreal elements that we can't imagine the canny Khan crediting; for another, many of them have features, like oil refineries, airports, roller-coasters and bus terminals, that even a notorious liar like Marco Polo would have had difficulty inventing. Someone seems to be pulling the reader's leg...Calvino obviously wants to break the automatic presumption that narrative in a novel involves a progression through time, much as Perec did a few years later in La vie: mode d'emploi (or Cortázar a few years earlier in Rayuela). The cities exist in a different time from the conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, whilst both are arranged in nine chapters without any obvious progression from one to another. Calvino cautions us against putting extra weight on the words that happen to come at the end of the book, and invites us instead to start in the middle, if we feel like it. To confuse things further, the cities are given titles in groups like "Cities and memory"; "Cities and signs", etc., whose members are scattered across different chapters, as though those would give us other kinds of sequences to read in.
Of course, being Calvino, he also wants us to reflect on how the imagined cities relate to their descriptions by the imagined narrator and (presumably) real author, how they relate to the set of all possible imaginary cities (cf. Borges's library), and what they tell us about the role cities play in our own real and imaginative lives. And — crucially — he wants to amuse and dazzle us with his wit, paradoxes, and crystalline prose. This is a book you can get a lot of pleasure out of on an Arabian nights level, without ever consciously getting tangled up in literary theory. But the philosophical vaulting horse and parallel bars are set up for you as well in case you want to use them.
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LibraryThing member blake.rosser
Impressive, though not entirely enjoyable. I can recognize its brilliance without really having liked it that much. If you like poetry, you will appreciate this book more than I did. Each city description is flowery and organic both in its formation and the image it evokes in your mind.
The book picked up pace and attracted me more in the later chapters, especially 5-7, when the narrative was a little more coherent. The concluding conversation was poignant as well. Any way you look at it, Calvino is a master wordsmith. Trying to imagine how he comes up with such scenarios and descriptions is mind-boggling.
It definitely merits another reading, perhaps in the order of each type of city. Normally, I put the three-star books in the "To be exchanged" pile, but this is one of the rare ones that has piqued my interest enough to keep around.
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Unfortunately, my taste is not sophisticated enough; I´ve never been able to fully enjoy poetry, and the same goes with this book. It seemed pointless to me a lot of the time. After reading this, Baron in the Trees, and If on a Winter´s Night a Traveler, I still enjoyed the last one the best.The book picked up pace and attracted me more in the later chapters, especially 5-7, when the narrative was a little more coherent. The concluding conversation was poignant as well. Any way you look at it, Calvino is a master wordsmith. Trying to imagine how he comes up with such scenarios and descriptions is mind-boggling.
It definitely merits another reading, perhaps in the order of each type of city. Normally, I put the three-star books in the "To be exchanged" pile, but this is one of the rare ones that has piqued my interest enough to keep around.
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LibraryThing member AndrewBlackman
I thought I would have liked this more than I did. I like most of Calvino’s books, and in this one the writing is absolutely beautiful, the observations on cities are clever and insightful, and the structure is innovative. But somehow, for me, all of these ingredients didn’t add up to a very
I think the problem was the lack of plot. The structure of the book is a series of one- or two-page descriptions of different imaginary cities, with occasional philosophical conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in between. Nothing happens, there is no progress, and nothing much is revealed about the characters. It’s all a long intellectual game. The flights of fancy were certainly very impressive, but I kept finding that my mind was wandering as I read, and I had to go back and start at the top of the page, something that has rarely happened to me since the days of prescribed reading at school and university.
I was reading quite late at night mostly, so maybe that was the problem, but again that is not normally an issue for me. If I like a book, I can concentrate on it even when I am dog tired. This one just failed to hold my interest, as much as I loved the premise, the writing and the ideas. The cities, as different as they were, just began to sound the same, and the descriptions became repetitive.
I guess Calvino’s point was to describe general attributes of the city by describing different specific cities that embody an aspect of it in the extreme – for example in Leonia people refashion their lives every day, throwing everything out and using new clothes, fresh sheets, etc. “So you begin to wonder if Leonia’s true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity.” This is a great insight, beautifully expressed, and the book is full of things like this. But there are no real people doing things.
I suppose this book made me realise that while experimentation is great, and beauty and cleverness go a long way, the more prosaic basics like plot and character do go a long way.
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rewarding whole.I think the problem was the lack of plot. The structure of the book is a series of one- or two-page descriptions of different imaginary cities, with occasional philosophical conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in between. Nothing happens, there is no progress, and nothing much is revealed about the characters. It’s all a long intellectual game. The flights of fancy were certainly very impressive, but I kept finding that my mind was wandering as I read, and I had to go back and start at the top of the page, something that has rarely happened to me since the days of prescribed reading at school and university.
I was reading quite late at night mostly, so maybe that was the problem, but again that is not normally an issue for me. If I like a book, I can concentrate on it even when I am dog tired. This one just failed to hold my interest, as much as I loved the premise, the writing and the ideas. The cities, as different as they were, just began to sound the same, and the descriptions became repetitive.
I guess Calvino’s point was to describe general attributes of the city by describing different specific cities that embody an aspect of it in the extreme – for example in Leonia people refashion their lives every day, throwing everything out and using new clothes, fresh sheets, etc. “So you begin to wonder if Leonia’s true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity.” This is a great insight, beautifully expressed, and the book is full of things like this. But there are no real people doing things.
I suppose this book made me realise that while experimentation is great, and beauty and cleverness go a long way, the more prosaic basics like plot and character do go a long way.
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LibraryThing member stravinsky
well, the dream-like language and fantastical imaginings reminded me a bit of Borges, except without a lesson to be learned.
Though, I fully admit I may be too dense for this work.
Though, I fully admit I may be too dense for this work.
LibraryThing member lisapeet
Oh, Invisible Cities, beloved of my youth. I have such a soft spot for this book, and it didn't disappoint: Memories of my college-aged self sitting in my friend's grubby East Village loft in a haze of pot smoke, passing the book around and taking turns reading chapters. It's still lovely, if not
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quite so revelatory as it was when I was 19, but as far as reading nostalgia goes it's unbeatable. Show Less
LibraryThing member rores28
One of the best books I've read all year. It's philosophical, it's beautifully written (translates well), and its presented in a unique fashion that separates it from the stock form of the medium. Calvino is simultaneously subtle and surreal, and though this book was short I found myself putting it
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down after every chapter to reflect and process what I had just read. A book that can be reread over and over not just to disentangle more of the mystery but for the aesthetic render of the prose. (though I feel as if I am slighting the writing by referring to it as prose) Show Less
LibraryThing member Ruecking
This is a poetic journey through the endless kingdom of the Great Kublai Khan as each city is rendered conversationally by his ambassador Marco Polo. There are as many synapses in the human brain as there are Invisible Cities to Italo Calvino.
The Khan has dreamt of a city for which he orders,"Set
The Khan has dreamt of a city for which he orders,"Set
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out, explore every coast, and seek this city" the Khan says to Marco. "Then come back and tell me if my dream corresponds to reality." "Forgive me, my lord, there is no doubt that sooner or later I shall set sail from that dock," Marco Says, "but I shall not come back to tell you of it. The city exists and it has a simple secret: it knows only departures, not returns." Show Less
Subjects
Awards
Nebula Award (Nominee — Novel — 1975)
Notable Books List (1974)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1972 (original Italian)
1974 (English Translation by William Weaver)
Physical description
165 p.; 5.31 inches
ISBN
0156453800 / 9780156453806
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DDC/MDS
| 853.914 |