Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
There is 1 current discussion about this work.
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Description
In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo - Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories 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. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.Tags
Recommendations
Member Recommendations
WSB7 Both have wonderfully imaginative but controlled semiotic exercises.
230
Carnophile Both books are liesurely contemplations of fantastical situations, not plot- or character-driven, but conceptual.
181
snarkhunt Calvino's book is a travelogue of impossible societies while China's book is a sweet little noir stuck in the middle of one.
113
P_S_Patrick Thes two books are in some ways very like each other, and in some ways quite the opposite. In Mr Palomar various locations, things, and thoughts are described precisely with the utmost eloquence and detail, whereas in Invisible Cities, it is one place being described in many different ways, hazy, as if seen through lenses of different qualities, and warping mirrors. But the effect is much the same, both books give you something to think about, make you see things in different ways, and are a pleasure to read. Both books also contain no strong plot, and consist of many small and diverse sections, and in a way, could be dipped into. Where Palomar gets very much into the mind of the protagonist, and his fixed, elaborate, and definite interpretations of reality, Invisible Cities is similar in that the recollections are also told from the point of view of the narrator, but differ each time, none being tied to reality, all of them containing aspects of truth found through how you interpret them. If you enjoyed reading one of these books, you should enjoy the other.
40
ari.joki An allegory of the human condition by revealing one facet at a time through presenting a foreign, strange city with foreign, strange inhabitants.
30
VanishedOne One is systematic and compendious, the other flows freely from one impression to another, but both flit between windows onto imaginary vistas.
42
Kolbkarlsson Written in the same vein, The Book of Scotlands lists a series of alternative scotlands previously unheard of. Every Scotland is written in it's own style, but with similar wit and daunting imagination.
20
defaults A series of descriptions of imaginary ancient Chinese paintings. Uncannily similar in tone, hieratic and surreal, rabbit-holes inscribed in rabbit-holes... and written several decades earlier.
CGlanovsky Little vignettes about places. Calvino's are more fanciful and there's a twist, while Schalansky's are little anecdotes based on actual bizarre and out-of-the-way places.
WSB7 Each has a partially factual/partially imagined frame.
claudiamesc Visionario, delirante, spietato, un bellissimo libro... un viaggio attraverso popoli dell'immaginazione, per chi si è già fatto trasportare da Marco Polo...
anonymous user For most this would seem like a quite odd recommendation, but give it a read if you are at all politically minded and you can see a connection.
06
sandstone78 Vignettes that create a picture of something greater.
hdcanis A novel starring a historical person (Marco Polo or Sigmund Freud) exploring a city (Venice or London) in fragmentary manner, each fragment handling a different aspect of the city.
VanishedOne One imagines many cities impressionistically, the other one city precisely, but each offers a window onto imaginary urban environments.
Member Reviews
This is a dense and fascinating book and while it is complicated on many levels, there are at least three themes that stood out for me: first, the nature of power and the cycle of life, death and rebirth; the illusion of happiness; and the power of language; second, the theme of travel being the source of imagination; and third, the theme of self-discovery.
Marco Polo tells tales of places he's been to the Great Khan, who at first takes them literally. Only later does he begin to suspect there's more to the stories, and the reader begins to do the same. The cities are dreams, or at least imagined landscapes, and recognizing this is the key to that third-level theme, self-discovery. If the tales are all imagined, they must tell us show more something about Marco Polo, which must tell us something about ourselves. Once we understand this, the purpose of the book becomes clear. It's a meditation on humanity. It's all there, parables about political power, warnings about the use and abuse of language, lessons about time and the raising up of awareness and social conscience.
1 like show less
Marco Polo tells tales of places he's been to the Great Khan, who at first takes them literally. Only later does he begin to suspect there's more to the stories, and the reader begins to do the same. The cities are dreams, or at least imagined landscapes, and recognizing this is the key to that third-level theme, self-discovery. If the tales are all imagined, they must tell us show more something about Marco Polo, which must tell us something about ourselves. Once we understand this, the purpose of the book becomes clear. It's a meditation on humanity. It's all there, parables about political power, warnings about the use and abuse of language, lessons about time and the raising up of awareness and social conscience.
1 like show less
One can't get enough of it and though I keep coming back to it time and again, this time I revisited it in Urdu translation. Given the inherent poetics of Urdu, all the cities imagined by William Weaver's translation seems beautifully refurbished.
Zeenat Hisam has done another masterful translation of a modern classic. She has captured the imaginative essence of the novel by achieving the same dream-like quality of William Weaver's English translation. I read some passages more than once to test whether I feel suspended between the poetry and prose in Urdu, which is signature Calvino. It happened without fail. I would certainly do a detailed review, however, any future reader or translator must know that geometrical structure of the show more novel is very important here, which is imported through a literary device of preserving homogeneity of titular relational attributes of each respective subset of the 55 cities.
I love that now we have an amazing Urdu translation to try to solve this Rubik Cube of novel in the language we love. show less
Zeenat Hisam has done another masterful translation of a modern classic. She has captured the imaginative essence of the novel by achieving the same dream-like quality of William Weaver's English translation. I read some passages more than once to test whether I feel suspended between the poetry and prose in Urdu, which is signature Calvino. It happened without fail. I would certainly do a detailed review, however, any future reader or translator must know that geometrical structure of the show more novel is very important here, which is imported through a literary device of preserving homogeneity of titular relational attributes of each respective subset of the 55 cities.
I love that now we have an amazing Urdu translation to try to solve this Rubik Cube of novel in the language we love. show less
Marco Polo sits in an idyllic garden with Kublai Khan and spins him stories of exotic cities he has visited, in between sipping sherbet, playing chess, looking at old books, and reflecting on philosophy. A simple formula, but Calvino doesn't want us to take it literally: for one thing the cities often have surreal elements that we can't imagine the canny Khan crediting; for another, many of them have features, like oil refineries, airports, roller-coasters and bus terminals, that even a notorious liar like Marco Polo would have had difficulty inventing. Someone seems to be pulling the reader's leg...
Calvino obviously wants to break the automatic presumption that narrative in a novel involves a progression through time, much as Perec did show more a few years later in La vie: mode d'emploi (or Cortázar a few years earlier in Rayuela). The cities exist in a different time from the conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, whilst both are arranged in nine chapters without any obvious progression from one to another. Calvino cautions us against putting extra weight on the words that happen to come at the end of the book, and invites us instead to start in the middle, if we feel like it. To confuse things further, the cities are given titles in groups like "Cities and memory"; "Cities and signs", etc., whose members are scattered across different chapters, as though those would give us other kinds of sequences to read in.
Of course, being Calvino, he also wants us to reflect on how the imagined cities relate to their descriptions by the imagined narrator and (presumably) real author, how they relate to the set of all possible imaginary cities (cf. Borges's library), and what they tell us about the role cities play in our own real and imaginative lives. And — crucially — he wants to amuse and dazzle us with his wit, paradoxes, and crystalline prose. This is a book you can get a lot of pleasure out of on an Arabian nights level, without ever consciously getting tangled up in literary theory. But the philosophical vaulting horse and parallel bars are set up for you as well in case you want to use them. show less
Calvino obviously wants to break the automatic presumption that narrative in a novel involves a progression through time, much as Perec did show more a few years later in La vie: mode d'emploi (or Cortázar a few years earlier in Rayuela). The cities exist in a different time from the conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, whilst both are arranged in nine chapters without any obvious progression from one to another. Calvino cautions us against putting extra weight on the words that happen to come at the end of the book, and invites us instead to start in the middle, if we feel like it. To confuse things further, the cities are given titles in groups like "Cities and memory"; "Cities and signs", etc., whose members are scattered across different chapters, as though those would give us other kinds of sequences to read in.
Of course, being Calvino, he also wants us to reflect on how the imagined cities relate to their descriptions by the imagined narrator and (presumably) real author, how they relate to the set of all possible imaginary cities (cf. Borges's library), and what they tell us about the role cities play in our own real and imaginative lives. And — crucially — he wants to amuse and dazzle us with his wit, paradoxes, and crystalline prose. This is a book you can get a lot of pleasure out of on an Arabian nights level, without ever consciously getting tangled up in literary theory. But the philosophical vaulting horse and parallel bars are set up for you as well in case you want to use them. show less
Este es uno de esos libros para leer despacio y de a cachitos. Es un libro sinestésico, que si lo leés mientras viajás en colectivo lo vas a poder sentir en cualquier imagen que se te cuele por el paisaje.
Un libro hermoso, suave y potente. Oscuro y brillante, profundo y juguetón.
Por si no quedó claro: lo amé.
Un libro hermoso, suave y potente. Oscuro y brillante, profundo y juguetón.
Por si no quedó claro: lo amé.
I am really struggling with Calvino. For some absurd existentialist reason, I am working through his texts in the perhaps vain hope of finding something that is truly interesting in his work.
This is supposed to be one of his greatest texts and one suspects that it might have been revelatory in some way at the time of writing but, increasingly, one's impression is that Calvino represents a moment in history when all the talk was of semiotics and not of substance.
Calvino seems to represent an experimentation that is heading nowhere. He is clever but he is dull. He expects us to engage intellectually with his thought processes but it all seems scarcely worth the effort since much of what substance there is represents a philosophical show more platitude.
The contrast with the subtleties of Di Lampedusa are striking and the revolt against the bourgeois novel only appears to have led to an incomprehensible bourgeois experimentation.
It is fair to say that Calvino, when he chooses to be lucid, can write brilliantly on occasions and those moments keep this book in the library - whereas his 'Castle of Crossed Destinies' is now on the pile for the second hand bookshop.
Perhaps he is best seen as a prose poet and coherence not expected of him - in which case, I am, sadly, the wrong reader for him since I like discipline and clarity rather than the second-guessing of another mind or the performance art of reading a book as if I were writing it.
There is one other thing to say in his favour. He does have a fertile imagination for the unusual concept or image - it is understandable why he is respected as creative in fantasy circles but what the reader begs for is that these remarkable short prose poems to be turned into narrative.
I shall persist with perhaps two more texts ... I like to give a man the benefit of the doubt but this is becoming tiring. show less
This is supposed to be one of his greatest texts and one suspects that it might have been revelatory in some way at the time of writing but, increasingly, one's impression is that Calvino represents a moment in history when all the talk was of semiotics and not of substance.
Calvino seems to represent an experimentation that is heading nowhere. He is clever but he is dull. He expects us to engage intellectually with his thought processes but it all seems scarcely worth the effort since much of what substance there is represents a philosophical show more platitude.
The contrast with the subtleties of Di Lampedusa are striking and the revolt against the bourgeois novel only appears to have led to an incomprehensible bourgeois experimentation.
It is fair to say that Calvino, when he chooses to be lucid, can write brilliantly on occasions and those moments keep this book in the library - whereas his 'Castle of Crossed Destinies' is now on the pile for the second hand bookshop.
Perhaps he is best seen as a prose poet and coherence not expected of him - in which case, I am, sadly, the wrong reader for him since I like discipline and clarity rather than the second-guessing of another mind or the performance art of reading a book as if I were writing it.
There is one other thing to say in his favour. He does have a fertile imagination for the unusual concept or image - it is understandable why he is respected as creative in fantasy circles but what the reader begs for is that these remarkable short prose poems to be turned into narrative.
I shall persist with perhaps two more texts ... I like to give a man the benefit of the doubt but this is becoming tiring. show less
Timing is everything. Had I read this book at the time of my obsession with postmodernism, I would have been enthralled. I would have spent hours and days identifying painstakingly all the connections between various cities, their meanings and symbols. Calvino would have become one of my favorite authors, I would have sought out everything he had written.
As it was, another -ism that captivated me for a while eventually lost its allure. When the book finally reached me - the sparkling imagination, the fabulous execution, the magical packaging left me cold. And while some cities, some reflections on human behavior were amusing they did not really touch me until I noticed the ever intensifying change of the tone from light and playful, to show more absurd, and then to predominantly dark.
It is in this gloom where the author of Invisible Cities takes you before delivering his most quoted phrase, a nugget of gold you can't miss as it is no longer invisible:
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. 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 inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” show less
As it was, another -ism that captivated me for a while eventually lost its allure. When the book finally reached me - the sparkling imagination, the fabulous execution, the magical packaging left me cold. And while some cities, some reflections on human behavior were amusing they did not really touch me until I noticed the ever intensifying change of the tone from light and playful, to show more absurd, and then to predominantly dark.
It is in this gloom where the author of Invisible Cities takes you before delivering his most quoted phrase, a nugget of gold you can't miss as it is no longer invisible:
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. 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 inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” show less
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.
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Author Information
387+ Works 69,776 Members
Italo Calvino 1923-1984 Novelist and short story writer Italo Calvino was born in Cuba on October 15, 1923, and grew up in Italy, graduating from the University of Turin in 1947. He is remembered for his distinctive style of fables. Much of his first work was political, including Il Sentiero dei Nidi di Ragno (The Path of the Nest Spiders, 1947), show more considered one of the main novels of neorealism. In the 1950s, Calvino began to explore fantasy and myth as extensions of realism. Il Visconte Dimezzato (The Cloven Knight, 1952), concerns a knight split in two in combat who continues to live on as two separates, one good and one bad, deprived of the link which made them a moral whole. In Il Barone Rampante (Baron in the Trees, 1957), a boy takes to the trees to avoid eating snail soup and lives an entire, fulfilled life without ever coming back down. Calvino was awarded an honorary degree from Mount Holyoke College in 1984 and died in 1985, following a cerebral hemorrhage. At the time of his death, he was the most translated contemporary Italian writer and a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Biblioteca Folha (21)
Seuil, Points roman (R162)
Biblioteca Sábado (28)
De twintigste eeuw (32)
Arion Press (57)
Keltainen kirjasto (127)
Gallimard, Folio (5460)
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Näkymättömät kaupungit
- Original title
- Le città invisibili
- Original publication date
- 1972 (original Italian) (original Italian); 1974 (English Translation by William Weaver) (English Translation by William Weaver)
- People/Characters
- Marco Polo; Kublai Khan
- Important places
- Venice, Veneto, Italy; Diomira; Isidora; Dorothea; Zaira; Anastasia (show all 57); Tamara; Zora; Despina; Zirma; Isaura; Maurilia; Fedora; Zoe; Zenobia; Euphemia; Zobeide; Hypatia; Armilla; Chloe; Valdrada; Olivia; Sophronia; Eutropia; Zemrude; Aglaura; Lalage; Octavia; Ersilia; Baucis; Leandra; Melania; Esmerelda; Phyllis; Pyrrha; Adelma; Eudoxia; Moriana; Clarice; Eusapia; Beersheba; Leonia; Irene; Argia; Thekia; Trude; Olinda; Laudomia; Perinthia; Procopia; Raissa; Andria; Cecilia; Morozia; Penthesilea; Theodora; Berenice
- First words
- Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expedition, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention a... (show all)nd curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.
- Quotations
- Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret,
their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)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.
- Blurbers
- Winterson, Jeanette; Vidal, Gore
- Original language
- Italian
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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- General Fiction, Fiction and Literature, Fantasy
- DDC/MDS
- 853.914 — Literature & rhetoric Italian, Romanian & related literatures Italian fiction 1900- 20th Century 1945-1999
- LCC
- PQ4809 .A45 .C513 — Language and Literature French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese literatures Italian literature Individual authors, 1900-1960
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