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Liked It “The book is difficult to define. It exist somewhere on the border of poetry and narrative. The imagery is easy to see, but difficult to grasp. It's a book that discourages a quick reading, changes how you view your own city and the function it holds in language.” see full review » see other reviews » |
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“The book is difficult to define. It exist somewhere on the border of poetry and narrative. The imagery is easy to see, but difficult to grasp. It's a book that discourages a quick reading, changes how you view your own city and the function it holds in language.”
Marcus W wrote this review Saturday, October 17 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Calvino is one of the trippiest writers ever. He crafts novels in ways that no other authors do, at least none I've ever heard of. This book was good, insightful for both some of its content and its structure. His books are never an easy read, though.”
Bryan G wrote this review Monday, October 5 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“I'm not a huge fan, but I can get the allure for those into this type of book. Read it on acid...”
Dick C wrote this review Saturday, July 25 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Invisible Cities was a different kind of novel. Instead of telling a story, the author tells many descriptions of imaginary cities. He presents it as Marco Polo describing cities from his travel's to Kublai Khan. Each city has the feel of a dream city with fantastical and/or philosophical elements. The reader is left wondering weather each city exists, if Marco Polo is making them all up, or if they are simply different ways of describing the same city or all cities. The writing is beautiful and often poetic. The images invoked are fantastic. Unfortunately, after the first few cities were described I started to find my attention wandering. I could appreciate the beauty of the writing, but it did not really hold my attention.”
Cora R wrote this review Wednesday, April 15 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Jen M 4 out of 5 stars Invisible Cities is a difficult book to analyze because it is not as cut-and-dry plotwise as we generally expect fiction to be. In this short novel, Kublai Khan receives reports from all of his commanders as they explore the world in search of new lands into which Khan can expand his empire. But the commander he seems to listen to most is Marco Polo, the mysterious Venetian who describes each city he visits with sometimes impossible images. Each city is named like a woman, and each has very distinct characteristics that readers may recognize in their own experiences. Gradually, the book takes on a philosophical feel, as Kublai Khan and Polo speculate on if these cities really exist, or were they dreamed. Or, are they in fact the ones being dreamed.
Author, Author Shelf wrote this review Saturday, April 25 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
A friend of mine asked me on Saturday if I liked the book. I did. I'm not really sure why I liked it, since it carried a very dream-like quality through the entire story and more than once, I found myself thinking "What is the point of this?" I'm still not entirely sure of the answer to that, but I do know that the writing itself is some of the most beautiful I've read in a long time. That alone is enough to recommend the book to anyone who doesn't mind drifting a bit sometimes
Cora R 3 out of 5 stars Invisible Cities was a different kind of novel. Instead of telling a story, the author tells many descriptions of imaginary cities. He presents it as Marco Polo describing cities from his travel's to Kublai Khan. Each city has the feel of a dream city with fantastical and/or philosophical elements. The reader is left wondering weather each city exists, if Marco Polo is making them all up, or if they are simply different ways of describing the same city or all cities. The writing is beautiful and often poetic. The images invoked are fantastic. Unfortunately, after the first few cities were described I started to find my attention wandering. I could appreciate the beauty of the writing, but it did not really hold my attention.
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“*This was my random library shelf pull for April, which turned into great fortune for me when Calvino was selected as the spotlight author for the Author, Author group.
Jen M wrote this review Sunday, April 5 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
Invisible Cities is a difficult book to analyze because it is not as cut-and-dry plotwise as we generally expect fiction to be. In this short novel, Kublai Khan receives reports from all of his commanders as they explore the world in search of new lands into which Khan can expand his empire. But the commander he seems to listen to most is Marco Polo, the mysterious Venetian who describes each city he visits with sometimes impossible images. Each city is named like a woman, and each has very distinct characteristics that readers may recognize in their own experiences. Gradually, the book takes on a philosophical feel, as Kublai Khan and Polo speculate on if these cities really exist, or were they dreamed. Or, are they in fact the ones being dreamed.
A friend of mine asked me on Saturday asked if I liked the book. I did. I'm not really sure why I liked it, since it carried a very dream-like quality through the entire story and more than once, I found myself thinking "What is the point of this?" I'm still not entirely sure of the answer to that, but I do know that the writing itself is some of the most beautiful I've read in a long time. That alone is enough to recommend the book to anyone who doesn't mind drifting a bit sometimes.”
“Marco Polo tells of his adventures to many different cities to the Tartaran emperor Kublia Khan. Each city is wonderfully depicted and astounding in its own right.”
Saeed U wrote this review Wednesday, February 11 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Once more, I have grown in my appreciation and respect for Calvino's works. He writes using precise words and never quits until he has portrayed an image in sentences. He is inventive, an original. This short novel has incredible power not for plot, but for characterization, imagery, and sheer force contained in the words.
Mark V wrote this review Monday, February 9 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
The characterization works like a photographic negative. He never tells us of Genghis Khan or Marco Polo; no descriptions or personality traits given. What he uses is their ideas and the things that they talk of to describe what kind of people they are. Thus, it is through their impressions on the template that I could tell what kind of characters they are. That is good, confident writing, I think.
The imagery is powerful too. Calvino strives to make his cities visible in the imagination. This is one trait that I think will make him be read years and years from now.
Take your time with this novel. In fact, I don't think that it is possible to even race through it. It's shortness is misleading, it is very dense and laden with vitality and deserves to be savored in enjoyment and not raced through in the reading. But if you can slow down and enjoy it, I think you will find it to be well worth the effort.
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“I read this before I moved to Florence for a few months. It's a book about traveling and discovering new things over time. Worth reading before or during a trip to Europe.”
Alex J. Mann wrote this review Friday, January 9 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
““The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the actors changed.” (64)
Jacque Day wrote this review Monday, December 29 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
It’s not unusual for me to do background study on an author new to me—admittedly (and regrettably) I’d never read Calvino before now—but in this case I felt I needed to know Calvino to be able to proceed. Putting his face into my head helped with the journey ahead. The reason—I felt a great many things about this narrative in the early pages that I didn’t believe I was absorbing on a surface level. In other words, me=impatient. Retrospectively I understand the absorption I craved may, may, may have come in a shorter time than my anxiety allowed me to suspect, that the intrinsic sensations of discomfort represented the manifestations of my efforts to figure out patterns I knew were there, but couldn’t see.
I like to nail things early and move on.
Amid the hypnotic beauty of the phrase and within the wondrous journey from one city to the next revolved a merry-go-round, circling slowly enough that I could easily jump on. But I felt, sensed, when it circled around again, in place of the horse was some other thing I’d never seen, followed then by the horse. And around and around and each time a bench or a clown in the place of the horse or the bench, followed by the rest of the familiar scene. Each revolution rendered the previous view, the pattern I’d gleaned, slightly off, so slightly that I doubted my own memory of the last turn.
“…the traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed…” (28)
Insanity!
The brain naturally wants to bring order to patterns. To ward off the sucking sound of here comes a platitude, I ask permission to state the obvious with the aid of a sidebar.
(Sidebar: My entire life I’ve seen sounds as colors—I’m not talking simple flashes, but more like transference of complex sounds into equally complex, and moving, color patterns. A symphony takes form and shape, colors jumping and careening in their paths, acting inside or defying their own patterns, their sense defined (or ill-defined) by their motion within the larger body. I liken it to watching a color-enhanced satellite image of a hurricane, or one of those dancing visual images that pops up on some computer audio players. Because I never found cause to think this unusual, I only recently openly discussed it for the first time, completely in passing, with a professional musician. I heard it called by name: Synesthesia.
(Sidebar within a Sidebar: A mite bit of research led me to one Dr. Sean Day, who holds a position at Trident Technical College in South Carolina, but more notably is a synesthete who serves as president of the American Synesthesia Association. A journalist, one Ormie Day, once told me that the Day bloodline is fairly confined and that we’re all related).
The point—my natural ability to see order and flow in color patterns begins and ends with sound. But something, some facet of Invisible Cities bore down on me like a piece of music I couldn’t see. It ate at me from the inside. Insanity!
So I manually broke it into a color pattern.
I thought seeing it this way would make the patterns clear. Chapters 2 through 8 function like funhouse stairs, shifting (to all intents and purposes) right at each level, tossing the edgemost item off into the ether and picking up a new starter at the head of the line. Call back the image of the slightly shifting merry-go-round.
That makes sense up to a point.
The at-first-glance haphazard patterns of Chapters 1 and 9 then began to show their own order. I’d just begun to comprehend this as not at all a linear matrix, when my other half, the physicist, walked in with dinner from Dihn’s. “I want to show you something,” I told him. “From what I’m seeing, Chapter 9 is the inverse of Chapter 1.” He took out a pen and paper, asked me to read the colors from Chapter 1 in order, then the colors from Chapter 9 in reverse order. Then he assigned numbers to each color. Same numbers, same pattern. “I bet the rest of the chapters run through inverse order,” I said, willing to leave it to assumption. But while I ate my wonton soup, Art took the entire pattern scheme through the steps, working inward, Chapters 2 and 8, 3 and 7, and so on. Same mirror image, same inverse pattern, converging with Chapter 5.
And by assigning positive and negative numbers to the colors, Art determined that the book adds up to sum zero. “It cancels itself out,” I said, again stating the obvious.
My mind raced.
I looked upon the grid with a bird’s eye, performed a mental animation, transformed it into a three-dimensional figure, assigning not only a color but a different height to each. I swooped down, stood at the base as if walking into my old neighborhood in Chicago, and a (seemingly) random cityscape rose up before me.
Art played further with the same numbers, digging for deeper patterns, eventually needing to get back to his own work. But before he retreated to his own realm, he asked if I’d send the grid to him. He wants to show it to some people in the math department.
I imagined twisting the pattern like the double helix, with the center of stability on Chapter 5.
“…the jam of past, present, future that blocks existences calcified in the illusion of movement…” (99)
Insanity!
I feel I could continue on, twisting and warping this grid, into a diamond, an orb, a dodecahedron…
“Whatever country my words may evoke around you, you will see it from such a vantage point.” (27)
…but I get the sense that it will always, always make sense of itself. It will always cancel itself out.
One thing for sure. I’ll never look at any city the same way again.”
