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Loading... Invisible Citiesby Italo Calvino
  
Magic Realism (7) » 33 more 20th Century Literature (145) 1970s (22) Books Read in 2021 (188) Short and Sweet (70) A Novel Cure (221) 1,001 BYMRBYD Concensus (264) Page Turners (60) Favourite Books (1,250) magic realism novels (25) Reiny (9) Unread books (419) Read in 2016 (17) Cooper (44) Tall tales (2) My TBR (95) Biggest Disappointments (384) No current Talk conversations about this book.  sriddell | Aug 6, 2022 |  8481302023  archivomorero | Jun 27, 2022 | Beautiful, like a set of prose poems, but also trance-inducingly repetitious. I feel that the context and circumstances under which one reads this book will greatly affect how it’s received. It would make a great book to read while traveling, or when visiting a city where one feels like a stranger. Alas, I’m too entrenched in my stolid, prosaic life at the moment to have been the reader this book deserves. (  ) Charon07 | May 24, 2022 | A book of superlative beauty, and short. A personal favourite of mine for many, many years; re-read after a considerable period. Fittingly, perhaps, I first heard of Calvino when I moved to a strange European city, and lived there alone in a grand house broken-down into tiny bedsits. There was a payphone on the landing two floors' up; Telecom Éireann has a poster on the wall above it quoting from Invisible Cities. Dublin then was truly a city with a literary spirit and maybe the rest of the country too. Somebody in its nationalised phone company had understood perfectly why lone souls might migrate to unknown cities, knew of a novel that expressed it with unparalleled elegance, and sought to promote both that book and a telephony service in the same advert. I bought the book and treasured it and forgot it and bought it again much later in life when I saw it in the bookshop of another European capital. I was frustrated, at first, by the blurb revealing that Marco Polo is revealing to Kublai Khan only one city. What a spoiler. But upon reading it again, the book is about so much more than that. It is a heady expansion of St Augustine's assertion that there is within each of us two cities (one formed by the earthly love of self, the other by the heavenly love of god); that there is instead and in fact a myriad number of invisible cities within all of us, an inevitable aspect of the human condition; rich inner worlds that allow us to breath and to grow or, paradoxically, that blinker and enslave us. The city and the human mind are echoes of each other. I shall leave this city before the month is out. I am moving to the hills. I do not know if I will live in a city again or of I will want to. What chapters will open to me after my departure I cannot say, but Calvino and this book and some sum of my past experiences shall be with me always. "...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 traveller'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 traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places." Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities. (  ) Quickpint | May 23, 2022 | Very well written nonsense. (  ) eatonphil | May 8, 2022 | no reviews | add a review
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In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo-Tartar emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts the emperor with tales of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. Soon it becomes clear that each of these fantastic places is really the same place. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)853.914 — Literature Italian Italian fiction 1900- 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.14)
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The book is mostly descriptions of cities - real cities, cities as they used to be or will be, imaginary cities, cities that have been dreamed. And the author makes the point repeatedly that what you experience in a city isn't really the city itself, but just a part of that city at that moment in time.
There are some jarring time shifts. Occasionally the author describes cities with trains and modern plumbing, electricity, and taking airplanes from city to city. He also includes LA and New York in the cities he describes. Surely not discussed by Marco Polo?
And really, really odd - interspersed through the book were interludes that seemed to pop out of nowhere: discussions of naked women taking baths,house ghosts who seem to be friendly until they're not, how once all the rats are gone the cities will be overrun with other creatures like unicorns and similar imaginary animals.
This book won some awards in the year it was published, so somebody liked it. Maybe I just missed the point of this book, maybe it's just not for me. (