Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
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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.
Atlas de Islas Remotas. Cincuenta y cinco islas en las que nunca estuve y a las que nunca iré by Judith Schalansky
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
Very poetic prose, like reading little gems & polished stones from a beautiful kaleidoscope. Imo, this book makes more sense & may have more beauty if you read it after reading Marco Polo's book; I think by reading Polo followed by Calvino, you get a lovely juxtaposition of described cities, real & imagined, ugly & beautiful, familiar & esoteric.
There has always been debate over whether or not Polo made his trek or if he was just a good storyteller (aided by his prison cellmate/scribe, a writer of adventure tales). I am wondering if Invisible Cities is Calvino's vote on the controversy. Invisible Cities describes many cities, yet, ultimately describes one city... Venice. So, is Calvino saying that Polo's account was the product of a show more good storyteller, one who was just presenting different facets of his home city, perhaps someone who never traveled very far at all yet could spin a good yarn?
I think this book would make fascinating, if unusual, reading for college students going into urban planning & development.
Unique & worth reading, especially if you have read Marco Polo's book. show less
There has always been debate over whether or not Polo made his trek or if he was just a good storyteller (aided by his prison cellmate/scribe, a writer of adventure tales). I am wondering if Invisible Cities is Calvino's vote on the controversy. Invisible Cities describes many cities, yet, ultimately describes one city... Venice. So, is Calvino saying that Polo's account was the product of a show more good storyteller, one who was just presenting different facets of his home city, perhaps someone who never traveled very far at all yet could spin a good yarn?
I think this book would make fascinating, if unusual, reading for college students going into urban planning & development.
Unique & worth reading, especially if you have read Marco Polo's book. show less
So, I understand why some will read this and think, "this is the most pretentious drivel I have ever read in my entire life." I'm not sure they would be wrong, but I do know that I thoroughly enjoyed it and I think you will get exactly what you expect out of this book. To me, it was a reflection of my mental state and conjured a lot of thoughts and emotions about things completely unrelated. This is a book of philosophy. It is a book that is sometimes deep, but the depth can be an ocean or a puddle depending on how you read the short collection of Marco Polo describing cities that may or may not exist. Fascinating book.
Reading this book was like drifting through a dream world where humanity was reflected in a far away shards of glass. Some of the cities were easily pictured, some so purposefully alien, while others felt familiar but upside-down. Each seemed to stand for many things: the potential pitfalls each person faces in their life, the ways in which groups of people band together, the various outlooks people will have regarding each other -- all melded together, with seams.
A disappointment, after loving if on a winter's night a traveler. I think I would have gotten as much out of this book had I read it in the original Italian - which I can't speak, much less read.
Invisible Cities looks like a novel. Each chapter begins and ends with snippets of dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. These dialogues explain the intervening snippets as Polo's descriptions of the cities he has visited throughout Khan's kingdom. But the descriptions do not advance a plot. They are too brief to impart any meaning, whether viewed individually or as a connected progression. Some are interesting. One city has two levels, the living above and the dead below, and no one knows whether the dead created the living city or show more vice-versa.
Eventually you are told that every city Polo describes is merely his reimagining of Venice. You are struck by the infiltration of modernity into Polo's descriptions—plumbing, for example. You get the feeling there is something more going on. But unless you know something of Italo Calvino's background, you will remain lost, even after the novel's fable-like ending: either become part of the mess that is the world (the inferno, in Calvino's nod to Dante), or recognize the problems and do something about them.
My initial thought after finishing Invisible Cities was the journey to that ending is not worth the effort. But this novel is on the 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list, and I wanted to understand why. So I read other reader reviews, and gleaned nothing that justified inclusion on that list. Most consisted of a few sentences about how beautiful Calvino's imagery is. Some acknowledged that there's probably more to the book than they understood. None provided insight into the meaning of the novel.
Because one reviewer referenced the Wikipedia article, I read it. Unfortunately, it was equally useless. It's main content is a description of the structure of the novel: a mathematical pattern the writing group Calvino was part of, OuLiPo, frequently adhered to in their writings. Several unexplained words (Baucis, anyone?) are interspersed within the description to imply it has some grand significance, but in typical Wikipedia fashion, there is no explanation. Instead, the name of the writing group is a link to another article. You can waste hours reading and clicking through additional links, ultimately emerging with the same lack of understanding you had when you first entered the labyrinth.
Finally, I turned to the academic world, and discovered that indeed there is more going on than just confusing and seemingly pointless descriptions of fictitious cities. Invisible Cities is an anti-novel. Or a meta-novel. Literature about literature. The descriptions of the cities are Calvino's commentary on various schools of literary criticism. To quote Igor Grbić (and I am not going to cite this correctly out of personal antipathy for the sham I think literary criticism is): "Invisible Cities is an extremely carefully woven text, on texts, the best of postmodernism in its need to write about writing, and read about reading. Its prime concern is language, and the linguistic, literary insight that though the city, the world, is not literature, it still is possible – actually, pressing – to read it as a text."
So it seems the novel was written in two languages I don't speak.
Even after being told that, I have no interest in analyzing the text at the level necessary to understand what Calvino was trying to say. Literary criticism is a circular firing squad of intellectuals who expend a tremendous amount of ink quoting other works that supposedly support the point they are failing to make. It is the synchronized swimming of literature: beautiful, but the scoring is subjective. The average observer can't distinguish between the gold medal performance and the silver or bronze. Obviously a lot of thought went into the novel, but in the end, what does the reader take away from it? In my case, nothing much.
My advice is read if on a winter's night a traveler, which explores Calvino's same interests in the relationship between author, text and reader, but provides an entertaining and satisfying story in the process. Leave Invisible Cities to the academics who find the Russian formalists informative and insist that books must be read through a multitude of lenses (post-colonial, gay, feminist) rather than being enjoyed as entertainment from which you might gain insight if the cultural commentary is well-executed by the author. show less
Invisible Cities looks like a novel. Each chapter begins and ends with snippets of dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. These dialogues explain the intervening snippets as Polo's descriptions of the cities he has visited throughout Khan's kingdom. But the descriptions do not advance a plot. They are too brief to impart any meaning, whether viewed individually or as a connected progression. Some are interesting. One city has two levels, the living above and the dead below, and no one knows whether the dead created the living city or show more vice-versa.
Eventually you are told that every city Polo describes is merely his reimagining of Venice. You are struck by the infiltration of modernity into Polo's descriptions—plumbing, for example. You get the feeling there is something more going on. But unless you know something of Italo Calvino's background, you will remain lost, even after the novel's fable-like ending: either become part of the mess that is the world (the inferno, in Calvino's nod to Dante), or recognize the problems and do something about them.
My initial thought after finishing Invisible Cities was the journey to that ending is not worth the effort. But this novel is on the 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list, and I wanted to understand why. So I read other reader reviews, and gleaned nothing that justified inclusion on that list. Most consisted of a few sentences about how beautiful Calvino's imagery is. Some acknowledged that there's probably more to the book than they understood. None provided insight into the meaning of the novel.
Because one reviewer referenced the Wikipedia article, I read it. Unfortunately, it was equally useless. It's main content is a description of the structure of the novel: a mathematical pattern the writing group Calvino was part of, OuLiPo, frequently adhered to in their writings. Several unexplained words (Baucis, anyone?) are interspersed within the description to imply it has some grand significance, but in typical Wikipedia fashion, there is no explanation. Instead, the name of the writing group is a link to another article. You can waste hours reading and clicking through additional links, ultimately emerging with the same lack of understanding you had when you first entered the labyrinth.
Finally, I turned to the academic world, and discovered that indeed there is more going on than just confusing and seemingly pointless descriptions of fictitious cities. Invisible Cities is an anti-novel. Or a meta-novel. Literature about literature. The descriptions of the cities are Calvino's commentary on various schools of literary criticism. To quote Igor Grbić (and I am not going to cite this correctly out of personal antipathy for the sham I think literary criticism is): "Invisible Cities is an extremely carefully woven text, on texts, the best of postmodernism in its need to write about writing, and read about reading. Its prime concern is language, and the linguistic, literary insight that though the city, the world, is not literature, it still is possible – actually, pressing – to read it as a text."
So it seems the novel was written in two languages I don't speak.
Even after being told that, I have no interest in analyzing the text at the level necessary to understand what Calvino was trying to say. Literary criticism is a circular firing squad of intellectuals who expend a tremendous amount of ink quoting other works that supposedly support the point they are failing to make. It is the synchronized swimming of literature: beautiful, but the scoring is subjective. The average observer can't distinguish between the gold medal performance and the silver or bronze. Obviously a lot of thought went into the novel, but in the end, what does the reader take away from it? In my case, nothing much.
My advice is read if on a winter's night a traveler, which explores Calvino's same interests in the relationship between author, text and reader, but provides an entertaining and satisfying story in the process. Leave Invisible Cities to the academics who find the Russian formalists informative and insist that books must be read through a multitude of lenses (post-colonial, gay, feminist) rather than being enjoyed as entertainment from which you might gain insight if the cultural commentary is well-executed by the author. 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
I am not a fan of post modernism and all the genres around it. I had tried reading it through the years, trying to see what people see in these books and failing every single time. I don't have issues with the meta-parts of the style. Or with the stream of consciousnesses narratives. The metaphors and the required imagination does not bother me at all. It is the combination of all of them, the attempt to use the language in a new way that backfires way too often. I can recognize a good novel of the type but I still don't like them and rarely read them.
Invisible cities is a post modern novel. Except that its author knows what he is doing and how to use language to hint and show. The description of the 55 cities is sparse and at the same show more time complete; it is a sketch done by a sketch artist who can convey more in a single stroke than another artist needs 2 feet of a picture to show. The framing story of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan has an almost Scheherazade's feeling to it - the stories of the cities do not seem connected to it or to each other but you can see how they derive from each other, complement and enrich them.
And now and again you hear about a city that you know about - like Trude - the city that anyone that had done consulting work will recognize - you need to see the name printed to distinguish between the airports, highways, hotels... Some of the cities come fully fledged; some are just sketched. And somewhere along the way, the book transforms into a dialog about language and cities, philosophy and reality, listening and talking (and does the listener shape a story or does the one that tells the story) and so much more.
I am not sure if I am going to read another book by Calvino - it still is not my style. But Invisible Cities is worth reading - mainly for making you think over something in a different way show less
Invisible cities is a post modern novel. Except that its author knows what he is doing and how to use language to hint and show. The description of the 55 cities is sparse and at the same show more time complete; it is a sketch done by a sketch artist who can convey more in a single stroke than another artist needs 2 feet of a picture to show. The framing story of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan has an almost Scheherazade's feeling to it - the stories of the cities do not seem connected to it or to each other but you can see how they derive from each other, complement and enrich them.
And now and again you hear about a city that you know about - like Trude - the city that anyone that had done consulting work will recognize - you need to see the name printed to distinguish between the airports, highways, hotels... Some of the cities come fully fledged; some are just sketched. And somewhere along the way, the book transforms into a dialog about language and cities, philosophy and reality, listening and talking (and does the listener shape a story or does the one that tells the story) and so much more.
I am not sure if I am going to read another book by Calvino - it still is not my style. But Invisible Cities is worth reading - mainly for making you think over something in a different way 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
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Author Information
392+ Works 70,079 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)
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De twintigste eeuw (32)
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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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