Reid's review
Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
Reid's review
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Reid's review
rating:
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 with its photo-negative or reflection or inversion presented afterwards. Calvino is clearly a master at this type of wordsmanship, while remaining true to his genuine emotion of decline, loss and heartbreak. At one point, the Khan asks Polo about the city of his birth, Venice: "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little." (87) Most of the stories focus on the various perceptions of ...more
