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utterly moved, and delighted
“Sometimes you aren't ready to read a book. My sister recommended Italo Calvino to me more than 10 years ago. My writing advisor a few years after that. I picked up "Invisible Cities" both times and put it back down again, finding it scattered and confusing. I found it again this week at my parents' place in Pittsburgh and devoured it each night, each dreamscape city building itself in my mind, breaking me down.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-16.
It's hard to say what the book is about. A conversation between Marco Polo and Kubla Khan at the twilight of his empire? Stories about cities and history? An ode to Venice? A meditation on time and memory and how going afar changes the near?
There is this passage:
"... what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places."
Though I can't completely get my head around this passage, I am utterly moved, and delighted. Perhaps I needed to go travelling for years for these words to resonate. Or to become a writer.
However, even with such a little book (less than 200 pages) and a lyrical and philosophical writing style, I found the city descriptions slightly repetitive, and some of the conversations as well. But I kept reading, feeling like there were secret messages. Like this wondrous passage, a call to a calling, a purpose in life:
"There are two ways to escape suffering the inferno of the living. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
I'm sure Mr. Calvino had an ordering scheme, or reasons for the categories of cities he chose. I couldn't decipher them, and I'm not sure whether any of that narrative stuff even matters. He is a philosopher, and an artist of the highest order. I highly recommend this book. ” -
0 of 4 members found this review helpful.
Pretty disappointed.
“If you like needlessly complicated words (he's one of those guys that'll say "masticate" instead of "chew") and a story without any plot, this book is for you.”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-14. -
Beautiful
“I have only discovered Calvino recently, due to a lack of classical education (I went engineering, instead, and thereby missed out on some good required reading in college). I have always been a reader, though, and when a few people I trusted said I needed to read Italo Calvino I started with If on a Winter's Night A Traveler. I was hooked.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-06-29.
Invisible Cities is my second helping of Calvino, and I am delighted. Calvino's words take you to each of the cities he describes, and each city will whet the appetite for the next.
This is a book to be savored. I think it is best consumed in 2-3 page bites over the course of a couple of weeks, so that you can let the flavor of each city sink in.” -
1 of 1 members found this review helpful.
55 cities--or 55 ways at looking at one
“Perhaps one of the oddest things about the reception of "Invisible Cities" is that it was a finalist for a Nebula Award. Although mathematics and architecture figure prominently, the book really isn't science fiction, and while it is certainly fanciful, it's a stretch to call this meditation a fantasy novel. Instead, Marco Polo's descriptions of 55 imaginary cities are clever, whimsical prose poems, mixing brainy puns and shrewd aphorisms. Calvino constructs cities the way Poe assembles dreams; "Invisible Cities" is the full-length work Borges never wrote.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-04-19.
The comparison to Borges is instructive, because what works in the short form begins to show signs of strain in this novella. Calvino sprinkles bons mots and truisms liberally amongst the tightly structured chapters (whose interwoven, enumerated headings might build, some readers argue, a sine wave or a skyline or something meaningful). Reading the book is to waver back and forth between admiring the clever wordplay and recognizing its cynical candor: "The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea." "There is no language without deceit." A city made entirely of pipes; a city divided for the dead, the living, the unborn; a city whose trash expands outward, trapping its citizens within; a city that looks just like the city you just left; a city that exists only in old postcards depicting a different city that never really existed--you'll recognize aspects of every city in each of these cities, or (more precisely) you'll recognize Venice.
Quite frankly, this isn't my thing; although parts made me laugh and parts made me think, I found "Invisible Cities" as repetitive and cute as it is innovative and profound, its substance a slave to its structure, its philosophy more dimestore than rigorous. (The metafiction of "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" and the allegory of "The Baron in the Trees" are more to my liking.) But this book will certainly gratify readers who long for fiction that aspires to Emersonian grandeur or who would prefer something more expansive than the bite-sized sketches offered by Borges.” -
2 of 2 members found this review helpful.
surreality amid stories and cities
“Though exceedingly short (166 pages), Invisible Cities by the 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 convinced I'll have to read it again just to even be convinced that I even read it in the first place.
An amazon user wrote this on 2008-12-20.
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.”
