Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
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Read in February, 2008
recommended to Jason by:
wikipediarecommends 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
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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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
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
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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...more
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...more
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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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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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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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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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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 with my o...more
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 with my o...more
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted...more
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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.
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Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted...more
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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
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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Read in June, 2007
Burned through this book while trapped in the grand, fuselage-like expanse of the LA jury duty pool (I say fuselage like because you can't leave, the chairs are uncomfortable and there is hardly anything to do but read). It's sort of wee and a pretty ideal little antidote for such an unpleasant place. Words thrown around about this book are 'surreal,' 'dreamlike,' and 'poetic'--and, yup, that's a big part of it. Not so much an engrossing narrative as it is a chance to visit some pretty magical i...more
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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
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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possibly one of my all time favorite books. this book is a fictional conversation between marco polo and khan and has polo describing the various cities he has seen in the empire and then khan describes cities of his imagination and asks polo if he has come across them... these are no ordinary cities... and the parallels you can draw especially between such cities as Leonia and modern day america... fantastic!
i highly recommend this book - if you need a vacation - curl up with a cup of tea...more
i highly recommend this book - if you need a vacation - curl up with a cup of tea...more
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Very interesting and original premise. This book consists of brief (2-3 pages long) "chapters" in which Marco Polo is describing to Kublai Khan all the various cities he has traveled to. And every few chapters, there is a similarly brief chapter of exchange between Polo and Khan. Thus on the surface this is primarily a descriptive book with not any real plot, character development etc. But halfway during the book, the exchange between Khan and Polo become rather philosophical and they ...more
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Read in May, 2007
recommends it for:
city planners, dreamers
Hidden cities, thin cities, cities and memory, cities and eyes, cities and the dead - this book is a collection of ruminations about them all, and they're all the same city.
Marco Polo is sitting with Kublai Kahn in the capital of Kahn's vast empire, they are contemplating the complexity of his conquered territory, and the italian traveler tells him these stories, poems, anecdotes, meditations. Each one is no more than 3 pages. They are gems you turn over in your mouth before you go to bed. ...more
Marco Polo is sitting with Kublai Kahn in the capital of Kahn's vast empire, they are contemplating the complexity of his conquered territory, and the italian traveler tells him these stories, poems, anecdotes, meditations. Each one is no more than 3 pages. They are gems you turn over in your mouth before you go to bed. ...more
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book data (includes all editions)
avg rating (all editions): 4.23 (2796 ratings) avg rating (this edition): 4.24 (2522 ratings) number of reviews: 264popular shelves
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quote
"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."
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