http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1343399...

No actual plot, just a series of very short vignettes of cities each of which embodies some aspect of human social interactions, told as a set of reminiscences by Marco Polo to his ruler / leader / captor, the Great Khan. Some of them are pretty vivid; they would have been more memorable if I weren't on a red-eye flight reading them. ( )

This is one of those odd books that when your done and put it down, your not sure why you read it; your just glad you did. A fascinating journey that was most enjoyable in a painful way. ( )

Marco Polo describes the many cities he's visited to Kublai Khan. Between the city descriptions Polo and Khan talk. This is Invisible Cities. If you're looking for story, if you're looking for character, if you're looking for lost symbols conjured up by a certain Brown... you won't find it here. You will find wonderful ideas and beautiful descriptions of cities and people. This was a little book that required a slow reading to enjoy the dense writing of Calvino.

One day I hope to look up at the city of Baucis and wave.

'After a seven days' march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foliage.

There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.' ( )

Yes, I know that this book is widely considered a masterpiece. Yes, I loved If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, and count it among one of my favorite books of all time. No, I did not care much for Invisible Cities. I can admire this book on an intellectual level: for instance, its structure is fascinating in and of itself. Different categories of stories march up and down in number sequence and are replaced by other categories as they run out of examples. And the cities all seem to have the names of women. You’ll be fascinated by the conversations between Kublai Kahn and Marco Polo about the philosophy of cities, ultimately questioning their very existence outside of their imaginations. But this is a cold book, a book to admire without loving it, an experiment in form and language that does not coalesce into a story. It reminded me a good deal of Alan Lightman’s Einstein's Dreams, which to me contains more life and heat – more poetry, perhaps – despite its unconventional structure. Despite my misgivings, however, I came away from Invisible Cities determined to read more of Calvino’s work. I’ve now read one book I loved to distraction, and another that fell entirely flat. It makes me very curious about how I’ll react to, say, Difficult Loves or The Baron in the Trees. ( )

This is the first book I have read by Italo Calvino. It popped up on my LT recommendations list, and being a bit of a city planning "nerd" (and interested in cities, in general), I was immediately intrigued. Happily I chanced upon a copy during my recent travels, and it became a perfect accompaniment for my trip.

At its surface, Invisible Cities is a dialogue between the famed explorer Marco Polo and the legendary Emperor Kublai Khan. Polo describes cities that he has visited on his travels, either physically or psychologically fantastical, and all curiously possessing feminine names. However as the tale progresses Khan becomes less convinced that Polo has actually traveled to these places. The reader is suspicious as well, especially as anachronisms creep into the descriptions...

The descriptions themselves are beautifully written, each intriguing and as well as self contained. The book is formatted into sections that open and close with dialogue between Polo and Khan, framing the descriptions of the different cities. The descriptions are also tied loosely to one another by their repeating titles: “Cities & Memory 1” or “Hidden Cities 4” for example.

Calvino explores not only the idea of the city (what is it anyway?), but uses the city to play with our notion of how we interact with our environment (built or otherwise). Did we create the cities or did they create us?

Along the same theme, the cities described seem to represent different parts of our psyches (at least to me). They probe at many aspects of the human experience such as: fear of death, weariness, love, and longing. At the same time, Invisible Cities explores broader dichotomies such as: permanence/impermanence; opulence/squalor; life/death; virtue/sin and truth/falsity.

To me, reading Invisible Cities was comparable to having a glass of fine wine. If you are inclined, you could drink it in quickly and eagerly, enjoying its beauty and flavour on one level. However, for me to fully appreciate Invisible Cities, I found it was better to sip it slowly and let the story unravel its complexities and richness as I meditated on the imagery and ideas Calvino presented. ( )