Invisible Cities

by Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities

published	May 3rd 1978 by Harvest Books
first published	1990
binding	Paperback
isbn	0156453800 (isbn13: 9780156453806)
ebook
pages	165
description	"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of ...more [close] "Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his." So begins Italo Calvino's compilation of fragmentary urban images. As Marco tells the khan about Armilla, which "has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be," the spider-web city of Octavia, and other marvelous burgs, it may be that he is creating them all out of his imagination, or perhaps he is recreating details of his native Venice over and over again, or perhaps he is simply recounting some of the myriad possible forms a city might take. [close]
date added	12-13-06 edit book

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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 3421)

Jason

Jason rated it:

02/17/08

Read in February, 2008

recommended to Jason by: wikipedia
recommends it for: old people, travelers

The problem with this book is that its prose. If these ideas had been transferred in poetry, using a lyrical sway to carry the message, I think Calvino might have pulled off better what he wanted to express.

The book is a conversation between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. Polo excites and intrigues Khan in telling him of all the worldly descriptions of cities within Khan’s empire. The rest of the book is 1-2 page descriptions of these “invisible cities,” which Khan has inquired ab...more

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Chad

Chad rated it:

08/31/08

bookshelves: aaaread-this-yearaaa, literary-novels

Read in January, 2008

At some point in the past, I got it into my head that Italo Calvino was really hip. I'm not sure why, as none of my friends have read him, I didn't study him in college, and hadn't actually even heard of him aside from seeing some of his shortish novels lined up on the shelves at Half-Price Books. Maybe its his name, which is all European and cool, combined with what is admittedly a pretty enticing title to his most famous work, "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler".

Apparently that...more At some point in the past, I got it into my head that Italo Calvino was really hip. I'm not sure why, as none of my friends have read him, I didn't study him in college, and hadn't actually even heard of him aside from seeing some of his shortish novels lined up on the shelves at Half-Price Books. Maybe its his name, which is all European and cool, combined with what is admittedly a pretty enticing title to his most famous work, "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler".

Apparently that's enough to impress me. So, I bought up a handful of his books, then forgot about them as they sat in a stack under my old desk. Impressive.

Usually at the beginning of a given year, I try to read something unexpected. I like to surprise myself by digging around and reading something halfway to the bottom of a stack or lost in the shadows of something like, oh, I don't know, say, my old desk.

So that brought me to Calvino, who I hadn't though about in quite some time. The above mentioned novel ("If On A Winter's blah blah blah) was the obvious choice, so I immediately set it aside. Never go for the obvious. Next in line was "Invisible Cities". I took it with me to lunch, then cracked it open to see if Calvino could live up to whatever the heck it was I had thought of him two years ago.

It was a slow start. In essence, the book is a series of portraits of strange and sometimes magical cities discovered over the course of the travels of the explorer, Marco Polo. The novel begins with a framing sequence in which Polo describes cities he's visited to the aging emperor, Kublai Khan. These sequences open and close the novel, and similar sequences are interspered throughout the book. As my experience went, these were the weakest parts of the novel. Not necessarily because of anything Calvino does, but moreso because I just didn't really get it sometimes. Its beautiful language, but it seemed to be overly opaque and poetic. I'm sure greater scholars than me find this beautiful and transcendent, but I just found it a bit of a slog and it put me in a negative frame of mind as the book moved into the cities themselves. (btw, I find this happens also sometimes when I read Donald Barthelme.)

Thankfully, Calvino moves beyond such overly convoluted verbal gymnastics and slips into the first of 55 dream-like studies of the eponymous cities. I won't go into the details of each city, other than to say each portait is about 3 pages long, and each is stunningly imaginative. The landscapes Calvino paints are beautifully rendered, but more beautiful than the descriptions themselves are the ideas behind the cities. I read the cities almost as little puzzles to be solved with rules that defied anything in reality, but were consistant within the conventions of the story. Calvino applies his playfulness to creating cities with unfamiliar and unexpected rules regarding time, memory, language, light, gender, geography, and on an on an on.

What you end up with as you flip past the final page, isn't so much a story, as much as a flip book of Marco Polo's journeys. Except the cities he visits are all impossible, and the only way you can see them is via Calvino's words, which recreate the impossible cities in your mind, where silly things like logic, physics, and common sense can be tweaked and nudged into new things.

And as a side note, I have to throw in a quick word about something that usually woudln't really effect my reading experience, and that was the font of the chapter headings. I had a friend several years ago who could name any font he saw (and collected them, as a matter of fact, on his computer). I can't do that, so much, so I can just say that the font is very obviously, and I suspect deliberately, modern: big slanted blocky shadows that produce the words in sharp relief. Its such a strange choice either by author or editor, but juxtaposed against the against the ghostly, ancient atmosphere of the actual text of the book, it creates this weird dichotomy as your reading that...well, that something.

Anyhow, in the end, I really enjoyed what I read. I haven't had any great desire to pick up a next Calvino novel, but in the moment, I was genuinly impressed by the ethereal worlds to which I had been taken. And now I have a real opinion of the man; something beyond that weird faux-impression I had when his books just collected dust under my desk. The man is an honest-to-god poet, and his brain goes places that aren't obvious, and he does a rather convincing job of helping you see these places as if, somewhere in between the seconds, underneath the shadows, behind the words we use to express ourselves, the invisible cities of Marco Polo might actually exist....less

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O'Donovan

O'Donovan rated it:

12/15/07

bookshelves: re-reading

Italo Calvino is one of those writers who is beloved by all of the friends whom I love most ... and whom I most want to impress.

So, as is inevitably the case, I sat down to read, because just owning the book is, apparently, not enough. Nothing was osmosing, no matter how long it sat on my nightstand. So.

I started reading it in a diner. I don't recommend this approach, but I think it's a testament to the book's beauty and Calvino's kind of, um, restrained giftedness that I was skim...more Italo Calvino is one of those writers who is beloved by all of the friends whom I love most ... and whom I most want to impress.

So, as is inevitably the case, I sat down to read, because just owning the book is, apparently, not enough. Nothing was osmosing, no matter how long it sat on my nightstand. So.

I started reading it in a diner. I don't recommend this approach, but I think it's a testament to the book's beauty and Calvino's kind of, um, restrained giftedness that I was skimming, skimming, skimming (also not recommended) and then said, "Whoa," out loud, and flipped back to the beginning of chapter six (which starts on page 10 in my edition, just to give you an idea) and started rereading, because I had a feeling that somewhere buried in all of the chapter's sensory descriptions and flash impressions was an actual story.

The closest I can come to describing Calvino to non-Calvino reading friends is that it's like reading a film.

Frex: "... The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper's swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen's nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of the guttering and a cat's progress along it as he slips in the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen's illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock."

Seriously. Hollywood could spend two or three hours on that paragraph, which isn't even the whole paragraph. Barely half a page, even, but that's what I love and kind of hate about Calvino: so evocative, so interesting, and you have to pay attention to catch it because you (or the story) can get washed away because the technique is so incredibly economical.

Hmm. I just talked myself into giving the book another star, though, because it really is brilliant....less

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Brian

Brian rated it:

08/14/08

Read in August, 2008

I just re-read this book after 5 or so years. What I had remembered about it was a cool book about Marco Polo describing Kublai Khan's empire to him by describing a long list of cities. After my first, brisk reading (it is a very short book) I didn't carry with me much else besides it being a cool "exercise."

Upon re-reading, I was blown away. This book has it All. Everything.

Every description of a city contains a great idea about memory, signs, interpretation, place, time, ...more

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Trianna

Trianna added it

05/09/08

In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping.

A girl comes along, twirling a parasol on her shoulder, and twirling slightly also her rounded hips. A woman in black comes along, showing her full age, her eyes restless beneath her veil, her lips trembling. A tattooed giant comes along; a young man with white hair; a female dwarf; two girls, twins, dressed in coral. Something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene: a blind man with a cheetah on a leash, a courtesan with an ostrich-plume fan, an ephebe, a Fat Woman. And thus, when some people happen to find themselves together, taking shelter from the rain under an arcade, or crowding beneath an awning of the bazaar, or stopping to listen to the band in the square, meetings, seductions, copulations, orgies are consummated among them without a word exchanged, without a finger touching anything, almost without an eye raised.

A voluptuous vibration constantly stirs Chloe, the most chaste of cities. If men and women began to live their ephemeral dreams, every phantom would become a person with whom to begin a story of pursuits, pretenses, misunderstandings, clashes, oppressions, and the carousel of fantasies would stop ...more

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Dfordoom

Dfordoom rated it:

04/03/08

bookshelves: sf-fantasy

Read in August, 2003

My favourite of Italo Calvino’s books. It consists of a series of impressionistic portraits of imaginary and possible cities described by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan. The cities are all fantastic flights of fantasy but they all represent some aspect of the idea of a city, or some way of looking at a city, or some way in which we think of cities or give names to our ideas of cities. They also represent ways of looking at human societies and life and death and the ways in which we comprehend th...more

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Reid

Reid rated it:

12/19/07

Read in November, 2007

I had never read any Calvino before this spring and loved If On a Winter's Night a Traveler. Calvino writes like a more patient Borges, exploring the passages one at a time branching off the main cave gallery. In this breathtakingly elegant work, Calvino shows us cities rife with contradiction, told by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan, with dialogues bookending the city descriptions. The short, meditative reflections on imagined cities gives the book a nice cadence, a postcard-view of the city, usually...more

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Lara

Lara rated it:

04/01/08

bookshelves: life-changing

I keep a copy of this around to use in the way some use tarot cards, or willow sticks or coins to throw the Yi Ching. I can open this book to any page, in any mood, with a question or somtimes simply a hollow heart, and there will be the story I need. Each city, each description (whispered to Kublai Khan to tell him of the vastness of his empire, most of which he will neither ever see nor understand...) is like an answer unto itself, a little meditation on a possible life. Some are as ...more

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Max

Max rated it:

06/16/08

Read in June, 2008

Invisible Cities is a playful deconstruction of the modern city and of the perception of place. Although the writing does not seem to be as lush as in Calvino's Under the Jaguar Sun (a difference in translation, perhaps?), the ideas here take precedence and ably rule the day.

Couched in the context of Marco Polo describing his explorations to Genghis Khan, Invisible Cities primarily consists of a series of descriptions of fantastic and unique cities Polo claims to have vis...more

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Jasen

Jasen rated it:

08/25/07

bookshelves: fiction

Read in April, 2000

I picked this up after becoming immersed in urban planning, reading and swearing allegiance to the small-footprint, high density environmental ethics school my philosophy professor Dan Holbrook, a rancher, had so disparaged. Calvino's fabulist take on cities stresses on how cities can be encountered and how the same city can be encountered in a multiplicity of ways. And that's the trick I'd later argue with Professor Holbrook: it's not the structure of cities necessarily undercutting any environ...more

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Jason

Jason rated it:

11/03/07

Read in January, 2007

There’s a blurb on the back of the book from Gore Vidal that says, “Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.”

Vidal is correct that a typical description of the contents of Italo Calvino’s book is “perfectly irrelevant”. His use of the word “invention” is also interesting and resonates w...more

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Jeremy

Jeremy rated it:

04/24/08

Read in April, 2008

I've never had alot of success with magical realism, and I found Invisible Cities as confusing and occasionally stupifying as other attempts have made me feel. However, I enjoyed this all the same. The premise of the book is simple: Marco Polo telling Kublai Khan about all the cities he's seen in Khan's crumbling empire. Each place is fantastic in its own way, and Calvino clearly has a story he's trying to tell, which is helped along by interspersed dialogues between Polo and Khan. Without those...more

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Matt

Matt rated it:

08/12/07

Read in August, 2007

Perhaps my previous experiences with Calvino's writings led me to expect something different out of this book. Each short chapter certainly had plenty to make me think about, but after finishing the book as a whole I am having a hard time putting all of those thoughts together in a coherent way. I liked it. I really did. But I'm left more with a feeling of not having understood something very important from the whole 'story'...something Calvino wanted me to understand. Is it really just t...more

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Wendell

Wendell rated it:

08/13/08

bookshelves: fiction

Read in December, 2007

I want to like it more than I am at the moment.

Edit: Now that I've finished it, I can look back at it with some perspective. I know that this will be a book that I should read a year or two from now, to see what else comes of it. It was a tougher read than "If on a winter's night a traveler" due to how short each description of each "city" was. Then again, his intention was to give us literary postcards. There were some passages that were absolutely lovely. An example: &q...more

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leighcia

leighcia rated it:

09/01/08

bookshelves: fiction

Read in August, 2008

In this novel, Marco Polo describes to emperor Kubla Khan (spelling?) the various cities in the kingdom that he has conquered. What follows are short vignettes describing various cities, that hover somewhere in between real physical cities and ethereal metaphysical cities. Calvino seeks to describe different aspects of the personality, character and scope of cities—their changes, the way they make people interact, their relationship with other cities, with poverty, with corruption etc… This ...more

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Merce

Merce rated it:

12/11/07

Read in October, 2005

"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his." So begins Italo Calvino's compilation of fragmentary urban images. As Marco tells the khan about Armilla, which "has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise verti...more

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Andrea

Andrea rated it:

02/26/08

bookshelves: read-2008

Read in February, 2008

recommended to Andrea by: Jason

I had to find the right moment to read this, but when I did Calvino's prose and narratives really connected. Calvino takes as his premise the explorer Marco Polo, in the service of Kublai Khan, on a mission to travel the Great Khan's empire and return with descriptions of all the cities, so that Khan might better know his kingdom. So then the book is a series of descriptions of cities, organized and book-ended by conversations between Polo and Kahn. But in addition to the stand-alone yet inte...more

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Loyola University Chicago Libraries

Loyola University Chicago Libraries rated it:

02/26/08

bookshelves: andrea

Read in February, 2008

I had to find the right moment to read this, but when I did Calvino's prose and narratives really connected. Calvino takes as his premise the explorer Marco Polo, in the service of Kublai Khan, on a mission to travel the Great Khan's empire and return with descriptions of all the cities, so that Khan might better know his kingdom. So then the book is a series of descriptions of cities, organized and book-ended by conversations between Polo and Kahn. But in addition to the stand-alone yet inte...more

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D rated it:

01/20/08

bookshelves: i-own-it, poetry-and-drama

Read in January, 2008

Perhaps, for each of them, I also resembled someone who was dead. I had barely arrived at Adelma and I was already one of them, I had gone over to their side, absorbed in that kaleidescope of eyes, wrinkles, grimaces.

-

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.

-

Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted...more

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Karen

Karen rated it:

07/28/07

Read in June, 2005

recommends it for: brainy types who want you to know it

I bought it because i heard it had beautiful imagery and it transported your mind to other worlds etc...

Yes, it has gorgeous imagery, and yes, your mind is transported ~ kinda wanders too. It makes me wish I was high while i was reading it. The pace is dreamlike, which works perfectly for it, but you really must be in the right frame of mind. You have to be willing to put in the effort to extract meaning from it. On the second read I got more out of it ~ Calvino is supposed to be esoteric et...more

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book data (includes all editions)

avg rating (all editions): 4.25 (3421 ratings)
avg rating (this edition): 4.25 (3138 ratings)
number of reviews: 336