Invisible Cities

3.5 stars ( )

An all-time favorite; a book unlike any other I know. Incredibly poetic, delightfully whimsical. Not a right choice for readers fond of action-filled page-turners. A book for dreamers longing for beautiful wor(l)ds.
( )

For an aesthete and especially a synaesthete like me, this combination of, oh ... geometry and spice is as good as it gets. Wish I'd had this book when I was 15, when each page would've made me translucent or sent me tumbling into the distant past or fill my mouth with dirt or whatever (they still do, momentarily, like a flash, but strawberries of course don't taste as good anymore with age either, etc.), and when even the bevies of bathing beauties (and dancing girls, and milkmaids) would not have seemed excessive. It's a catalogue of wonders here. ( )

This was the book which did not want to be found. For nearly a year I kept my eyes peeled for it, casually at first, vigorously for the last five months of that time. I went to used bookshops looking only for this novel, I tried new bookstores and was ready to pay those extra pennies for it, in cities and small towns in British Columbia and Ontario, but I could never find it. When I got an e-reader for travelling (and thought how I'd better travel with this one) I searched online but could not find anywhere to buy a digital copy. It was such an infuriating thing, and I will still buy a physical version of this book if it ever comes into existence again because I had to get it onto my e-reader using alternate means.

I first heard about this book back when I was in that Medieval Spatial Theory class where I was reading that dry and heavy tome, [b:The Production of Space|328403|The Production of Space|Henri Lefebvre|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1347614979s/328403.jpg|1093553], interspersed with Middle English poetry. Marco Polo's [b:The Travels|574929|The Travels|Marco Polo|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1175924299s/574929.jpg|2369172] was a text for the class and Italo Calvino's name came up quite naturally as it bridged the theory and the literary. What are cities and what do they mean? Is a city the same from one moment to the next because it maintains a name and a mostly-fixed geographical location, or does it constantly change to become a different city? How do each of us know cities differently, and can we call it the same place when there are such differences in what it means to us? All those kinds of questions are raised in this book and made it constantly interesting. Calvino writes beautifully and the way his ideas take shape really pulls at me.

The faults I found were two: that I had a digital copy which diminished the aesthetic of the book and did, I think, affect how it is meant to be read (for which I do not fault Calvino, of course), and that I'm not very fond of the cities-as-women/women-as-utopias that pervades it. Calvino really Gazes at women, and I found the same thing in [b:If on a Winter's Night a Traveler|374233|If on a Winter's Night a Traveler|Italo Calvino|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1355316130s/374233.jpg|1116802]. He is constantly reading women but it doesn't seem like he ever listens to them. He is always the authority/author who can interpret them better than they could themselves or even enhance them by the poetry of his evaluations. They seem so aesthetic in his novels and I can't see eye-to-eye with him on that. Whenever he writes about women I wish he'd just stop, really. So while he's got women that are characters and frustrating, there's also the fact that all these cities have female names and I would have liked the book better if it were possible to ignore the fact. ( )

OMG! Unbelievably clever and mind expanding. ( )