Dfordoom's review
Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
Dfordoom's review
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Dfordoom's review
rating:
bookshelves:
sf-fantasy
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 the world and give shape to our understanding of the world. The cities are often bizarre, and some are uninhabited. Some never were, or could be, inhabited. Some are cities of the dead. Some are cities that can never be reached. Some of them are simply states of mind. One of the things that Calvino is preoccupied with is the way we try to impose order on the world by naming things, and he’s interested in the relation between the names we give things and the things themselves and the things...more
