Customer Reviews

Invisible Cities

5 star:		(78)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Once more, I have grown in my appreciation and respect for Calvino's works. He writes using precise words and never quits until he has portrayed an image in sentences. He is inventive, an original. This short novel has incredible power not for plot, but for characterization, imagery, and sheer force contained in the words.

The characterization works like a photographic negative. He never tells us of Genghis Khan or Marco Polo; no descriptions or personality traits given. What he uses is their ideas and the things that they talk of to describe what kind of people they are. Thus, it is through their impressions on the template that I could tell what kind of characters they are. That is good, confident writing, I think.

The imagery is powerful too. Calvino strives to make his cities visible in the imagination. This is one trait that I think will make him be read years and years from now.

Take your time with this novel. In fact, I don't think that it is possible to even race through it. It's shortness is misleading, it is very dense and laden with vitality and deserves to be savored in enjoyment and not raced through in the reading. But if you can slow down and enjoy it, I think you will find it to be well worth the effort.

In this wonderful litle book, an imaginary Marco Polo tells an equally fictional Kublai Khan the story of his many travels through the Mogol Empire, and all the cities he has known. They both know it's all in Polo's brain, but who cares, the imaginary cities are so vivid, so visually possible, that the emperor keeps demanding more of them.

Calvino really lets his imagination get high, to create the most bizarre, beautiful, horrible and crazy cities as any you yourself can imagine. Cities of all places, ages, shapes and peculiarities come to your mind. Calvino is really good at depicting impossible places, but also places that somehow remind you of real cities you've been to.

A remarkable work of imagination, well written, this is the ideal book to read in a dreamy scenery, but also in one of these quasi-impossible cities we humans have created, the craziest ones, such as NY, LA, Tokyo, Mexico City, etc.

So here I was, flying north, thinking about themes such as axioms, storytelling, pattern recognition, and facilitation from the grandest, most broad vantage point. Before me, this short book of short stories based upon conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Invisible Cities is very simple on the surface. It contains several series' of short stories - 1 to 3 pages in length - that chronicle Polo's excursions into cities throughout the domain of The Khan. The stage is Khan's garden, where Polo has been summoned to report on his journies. Each series of stories is bound by a brief contextual passage, usually a dialogue between Polo and Khan about the nature of Polo's journies and their meaning. From this simple structure, Calvino weaves a rich tapestry of patterns, some obvious (take a look at the table of contents) some very subtle (read between the lines when you read the passages that bridge one section to the next).

Calvino is a masterful story teller - with an uncanny abililty to create space, setting, scene and mood. I found Invisible Cities a personal, intimate read. Marvelous.

Calvino created many books that utterly defy description and evade simple laconic summaries. "Invisible Cities" provides the exemplary of all exemplaries for these traits. This book is to be experienced more than discussed or analyzed. Each reader will likely mine personally unique reflections and meanings from the multitudinous vignettes and themes. Though physically very thin it's actually about three miles thick with meaning. Reading it in one sitting gives the feeling of overeating, like some things ingested were not quite fully digested. This leaves a lingering feeling of regret that one may have eaten too quickly.

Probably the best thing to do after reading "Invisible Cities" is to read it again soon. On a second reading, voluminous nuances begin to peep out from between the lines of text. Then read it again and again and again... every reading reveals something new.

The writing, like all of Calvino's works in translation, is stunning and hypnotic. Most of the book contains second person descriptions of cities, real or imagined, past, present, or future. Discussions between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo bookend these one to three page narratives. The two famous personages often wax philosophical. Sometimes Kublai Khan accuses Marco Polo of lying, or laziness, or stubborness. Kublai Khan wants nothing more than to possess his empire, and he looks to Marco Polo's tales for assistance. But almost immediately something seems awry. The historical Marco Polo died around 1324, but the tales he spins include references to radios, parasols, oil refineries, airports, and other very twentieth century items. Something far juicier than historical fiction begins to unfold.

Though the subject of the book encompasses much more than a mere reflection on cities, it manages to evoke much about their unique nature. Each city contains everything it was and everything it will be. A city contains perspectives, opinions, relationships, inhabitants, and exiles. Calvino pushes his theme almost to its limit. Section nine, the book's final section, becomes almost surreal but still manages to leave a lasting message.

Some standout sections include: the description of the spider-web city supported by veins of ropes; the city where the visitor sees the faces of people he or she once knew in its inhabitants; the city formed by men who dreamt of a naked woman running through city streets; all of the passages are ultimately noteworthy, but some contain shocking beauty. Discernible patterns also weave through the sections and thier titles, and the table of contents itself reveals a pattern.

Written between the lines of this amazing book is the ineffability of all being. Past, present, and future, when put under the microscope, can become incomprehensible and overwhelming. At the same time past, present, and future appear present in everything. "Invisible Cities" reflects this somewhat mind-bending characteristic of reality. Similar to many of the cities Marco Polo relates to Kublai Khan, the book itself is a work of imagination that attempts to envelop the past, present, and future with the analogy of cities and their physical and metaphysical stratifications. It also points out that we all need anchors in this puzzling and fuzzy infinity. Marco Polo reveals his. Does Kublai Khan? Finishing the book will leave readers with a sense that something monumental has occurred, but words won't do justice to this feeling. One will know that "Invisible Cities" stands as an amazing literary achievement, and one of Calvino's finest.

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that it is a sin to write a long book when the idea for it could be explained in a few pages. I don't entirely agree, and I doubt Italo Calvino did either, but from this book alone he certainly could have.

The reason I say this is because Invisible Cities consists purely of ideas. There is no plot and only two major characters, who are really not characters so much as plot devices. (Perhaps not plot devices, since I just wrote that their is no plot, but I think you understand.) There is only a series of thoughts on perception, memory, time, and many other topics, explained through a series of descriptions of fantastical cities. Sometimes the meanings of the cities are clear, but most contain various degrees of enigmaticism.

This book is short, but I don't recommend trying to read in one or a few days. It seems to work best if you read it a little at a time. My only real complaint with the book is that it seems to end arbitrarily rather than concluding. This is a brilliant book.

Back in the days of my wasted youth I was really into ZAP COMIX. For those readers unfamiliar with that august publication, the content was "highly varied" but almost always politically incorrect. One kind of page aimed at readers who did not flinch from inhaling certain controlled substances. There would be, for example, a house and garden in a cartoon box. In each successive box, a little bit more would disappear. In the next to last box, there would be a tiny circle, made into a `yang and yin' design and in the last box it would go "plink" or "poing !" and there would be nothing at all left. INVISIBLE CITIES brought these stoner cartoons to mind, because what you get out of the book (or the cartoons) is mainly what is already inside you. Marco Polo regales Kublai Khan with endless tales of the different cities he has visited while travelling round the great Mongol Empire. Each city bears a woman's name and some possess modern features never seen in the Venetian's lifetime. The description of each city gives some kind of philosophical essence, so that what we are really reading is a kind of compound of Calvino's imagination and deep thoughts melded together into a kind of literary pill. It's up to you if you want to swallow it. "Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches." he intones. "The unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence." There's hundreds of mantras like this, kind of literary Chinese fortune cookies written by Khalil Gibran. In the end, Marco admits that he's made up these descriptions, but says that if the two of them did not "think the cities and their inhabitants", they would not exist. The Khan agrees. If such sentiments and literary directions are your bag, then this could be a very interesting book. I note that the majority of reviewers were people who liked the book. This is not always the best guide for surfers with questions. For my part, I grew tired of the repetitive format, the somewhat shopworn philosophy. To each his own.

The first book I read by Calvino was If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, and I thought it was brilliant. I am equally floored by Invisible Cities. I'm not sure you could call it a novel -- there is a sense of movement through the work but it isn't narrative movement, it's the movement of ideas, an unfolding of Calvino's ways of characterising the nature of cities. The work is broken up into meditations that rarely extend for more than two pages; each discusses a city along a theme, describing how that city instantiates or represents a certain universal property that all cities share in to some degree. The beauty of the work comes from the way Calvino traces these themes: the tension between the way things are and the way we see or describe them; the tension between disparity and unity, or similarity and difference; the tension between progress and decay; between monotony and beauty. Almost every meditation took my breath away with the breadth of imagery and ideas that Calvino manages to evoke from such sparse prose (once again, William Weaver proves to be an utterly brilliant translator; I'm pretty sure he's responsible for the best translations of Svevo, as well, amongst others). The idea of the book itself is one thing; the execution is another. I'm going to find it hard not to continue through his works one by one from here. The final quote runs (no chance of giving anything away):

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what we already have, 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 recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

I was recommended this book from my friend shortly after finishing graduate school when in need of a good detox-read. To me the book was far from the brainless entertainment I was hoping for. In fact, Invisible Cities was full of thought provoking and poetic images of imaginary cities expressed through dialogues between Marco Polo and Kublia Khan. At first I was struck by the unusual premise for the story and then later struck by the highly symbolic descriptions of the cities. Through Calvino's use of symbolism I began to have a different appreciation for the forms and structures of cities and civilizations. This could have been the first time I really thought about cities as a living architecture and the container for our memories and dreams.

With all of the above said, one problem I had when reading Invisible Cities was my mind seemed to easily drift off the page. The book reads more like poetry then a novella and I felt that halfway through the book the form of the chapters became almost too redundant. I think that if I were to re-read the book and spend some time with it I could have gained greater insight into Italo Calinvo's perspective and creative mind. Although I am not rushing to re-read it anytime soon, I would possibly read it again in the future.

I love this book. It taught me to see beyond the external appearance of cities and to look for the spirit behind things.

Maybe that sounds a bit pretentious, but Calvino wrote a book that described dozens of imaginary cities in terms of what really makes them tick: cities peopled by the dead, a city that followed the design of the heavens with horrid results, a city that hangs from ropes stretched out across the abyss, a city where one is always old, a city designed to trap a woman seen in a dream, a city that can never be arrived at (one can never make it through the suburbs) and so on.

It is a marvellous "travel book": one wishes that all travel guides arrived at this degree of subtleity and understanding rather than getting bogged down in mere descriptions of shops and hotels.

A bittersweet touch is added when Marco Polo (who is the book's narrator) explains that, rather than describe the cities of the Chinese Empire, he has always spoken of his native Venice. Our hometown is always implicit in every city we see or describe, because that is our real standard of measure.

I hope this review makes sense to other people. This book is hard to describe, but a marvel to read.

Calvino is well-known for stretching the form of the novel, and Invisible Cities is certainly innovative in this respect. Somewhat in the style of '1001 Nights', the reader is offered a series of one page descriptions of the cities Marco Polo has visited on his travels. Interspersed with this are conversations between Polo and his patron, Kublai Khan. The Khan has not seen these places because his empire is simply too big. In this sense the cities are invisible. However, it becomes increasingly likely that Marco Polo hasn't seen them either. Is he describing nothing but different facets of his home town, Venice - or is he making the whole thing up?

Wherever the truth may lie, each city Polo describes is simultaneously fantastic and true. Each page captures the magical reality of urban life, in a way that no 'realist' account ever could. Not only is this a great novel, it is a novel all town planners and architects should be forced to read. Calvino reminds us that we will only ever live in cities as grand as our imaginations. What we need is to imagine more vividly.