Invisible Cities

One of the fabulist master's all-time greatest achievements. Reads like a series of dream-scapes but with incredible depth beneath the gaudy surfaces. So enjoyable to read. Thought-provoking but by no means plodding or heavy-handed.

This is the book, I will be reading for the rest of my life, struggling never to get to the last page... Because after the last page there is a void, the edge of the world and no more cities. Or are there?...

Calvino uses evocotive poetic language to construct a magical world in this book. The short vignette chapters can be read and reread in or out of order. I use this book to refreshed the way I see my own everyday world, to transform it.

I am excited to read this book, but I am disappointed in the quality of the paperback. The cover is barely thicker than a thin watercolor paper, the pages are like newsprint with sloppy, bleeding text. I will enjoy reading this book, but I won't enjoy destroying the paperback in the process.

Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" is a most beautifully written story; the person who did the translation did a remarkable job. But there it ends for me. The descriptive narrative for each [mythical] city starts to sound the same after a while. It is not a "spell-binding" book; in fact, I'm still reading it. The language is beautiful, the story dull. I have not been transported.

It was a magnificent production. The Union Station with its everyday people and we the audience milling among them along with the actors and dancers added a dimension I have never experienced before. The music and the singing was superb and the dancers electrifying. I am so glad I took the train from Culver City to see it. I look forward to more such operas.

This review is really about the audiobook available via whisper sync. I would not recommend it. Hard to even know what I think of the book (I think I liked it). The audiobook really tainted my experience.

While tales told by Marco Polo to his great master should have been compelling, I felt as if I had to drag myself from one to the next. Calvino just never caught my interest in the story line, even though I had expected to enjoy it a great deal.

This is an interesting book to read because of the descriptive and 'flowery' language. I had to buy it for a Design Culture class because the teacher has us reading and answering test questions on the book.

Posed as a dialog between Marco Polo and Genghis Khan, it abandons that era to speak of later inventions in a rambling daydream of imagined cityscapes. Don't bother with this. It gives no insights, just an annoying tangle of words.

I loved Invisible Cities so much that after I finished the audio version, I purchased a print copy for my coffee table and bought copies for some of my friends.

Invisible Cities is certainly not a book to read for plot, and I wouldn’t recommend reading it straight through, either. I’d read the individual city “stories” as short meditations that are metaphors for life, memory, travel, love, and other aspects of the human experience and human nature.
Every city, every image, is a metaphor and readers are likely to take away different interpretations.

Invisible Cities is highly imaginative and philosophical with an elaborate, even mathematical structure. I admired everything about it and now I want to go read it again. The audio version is narrated by John Lee, who is wonderful.

Originally posted at Fantasy Literature

The book includes Marco Polo's descriptions to Kublai Khan of faraway places (though it's unclear if these parts are fictional, true, or fiction-based-on-truth). It's poetic, heart-warming, and soul moving. There is more to be felt in these short, simple descriptions of settings than many authors convey or achieve with entire novels. I urge any writer struggling with settings to study this book. The philosophy included in these pages is on par with Socrates.

Modern descriptions are woven in with the ancient ones. The underground trains of Zirma are mentioned, when trains did not exist until 500 years after Marco Polo. That is the first clue that this book means to transcend time, to travel back and forth through it without regard. Sophronia has a rollercoaster, carousel, Ferris wheel, motorcycles, and factories — all of which were, obviously, never encountered by Marco Polo. Leonia, a city with refrigerators, radio, toothpaste, and light bulbs— is a city that sounds like the whole of America.

I find myself wishing there was a videogame with the objectives of building and maintaining the cites described in this book. Something along the lines of Sid Meier's Civilization series, or the Anno games, or even another version of The Sims and Sim City would be wonderful to bring this book to life.

So apparently I read this book like three years ago... While I recall having started it, I do not recall finishing it. I recall being annoyed by the meandering storyline and seeming lack of destination. I have a difficult time valuing the journey over, or even as much as, the destination, so this book, I thought, was not for me.

Having just finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveler last night and not yet having received my next the store package, I decided to revisit this one. I'm glad that I did. I am definitely in a different place right now, and the lessons learned from the previous novel definitely combined to make this an entirely different and enjoyable experience. "It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear." Perhaps that is my biggest takeaway this time.

I can't say there was a huge payoff at the end this time... I can't say that I really fully learned anything except to continue to value a story for when and where it exists without needing something grander to lend it credence. I had to become a listener here... not looking for a meaning but just enjoying the tales being related by someone with experiences vastly different from my own. Calvino just let his imagination run wild. I felt like every description was the beginning (or end) of a much larger and more interesting story... but somehow was still able to let each one come into existence and quickly fade away without feeling cheated. Especially today when we all want sequels and prequels and behind-the-scenes... it became refreshing to just take these glimpses into societies that will never exist. Or have always existed.

I would find it difficult to really recommend this to anyone as I feel like it definitely requires a particular state of mind to allow one's self to become immersed in and appreciate such a string of seemingly unrelated tales. If your ears are ready to hear, however, then this is an excellent exercise in listening.

If you're looking for light reading, something to unwind with after a tough day, I'd recommend moving on. On its surface, the novel is little more than a long conversation between two men about an empire, which may or may not exist as described. If you're someone who just likes to read for the fun of the plot, that plot isn't going to do much for you. This isn't the type of novel where the plot hooks you. There really isn't a plot. In a certain way, there really aren't characters, at least not in a conventional way. When you read this, you've got to think and you've got to be open to tangents. The novel does discuss many interesting topics and themes having to do with memory and perception and understanding, but you've got to let Calvino's descriptions of the cities guide your mind off on these tangents. If you focus too hard, as I found myself doing a few times, it does get dull. It's a matter of relaxing. It's like looking at a painting. Sure, you can see it and admire it for pretty picture, but you're really meant to feel something, to go somewhere inside yourself to make meaning. You have to do the same thing here.

"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening..."

So writes Italo Calvino, in one of the more ethereal experimental books he wrote. While not as weird as a book made up of tarot card adventures, "Invisible Cities" is a story that defies easy classification -- it's soft, dreamlike narrative in which one man tells another about the magical cities he's seen. Or, possibly, has not seen.

The famous Venetian explorer Marco Polo arrives in the empire of Kublai Khan, and the two men become friends. In the evenings, Marco tells the Khan of many fabulous cities -- the grey metal and stone Fedora, the stilted Zenobia, the haunted moonlit Zobeide, the sensual and bejeweled Anastasia, the cloud-straddling Baucis, the watery Esmeralda, a city of dead people known as Adelma, the dirt-choked Argia, the hazy rose-tinted Irene, and many others.

"Invisible Cities" isn't really a story so much as a series of beautiful pictures-in-prose. It's like we're watching Calvino paint us portraits of his fantasy cities with his words -- and except for Kublai Khan and Marco Polo occasionally conversing about trade, travel or chess, there is no actual plot here. It's just gorgeous portraits of imaginary cities.

And therein lies its charm. Calvino came up with dozens of fantastical cities in here. Few if any of them could actually exist, but they are so suffused with sensual beauty ("its villas all of glass like aquariums where the shadows of dancing girls with silvery scales swim...") and darkness ("All corpses, dried in such a way that the skeleton remains sheathed in yellow skin, are carried down there, to continue their former activities...") that you don't care.

Instead, Calvino comes up with strange, weird and illogical ideas, such as a city with ho actual buildings, but lots of plumbing. There are cities of the dead and the unborn; cities of the sea, the air, the earth and the sunrise; cities where everyone is a stranger and steampunk cities rusted into oblivion. It's like he's opened a hundred doors to eerie other worlds, and let us take a single picture of each before the doors close.

"Invisible Cities" is not a book for people who like plot -- instead, it's a chance to immerse yourself in Italo Calvino's magical language and imagination.

I dearly love these tiny one page stories . these incredibly imaginative images of impossible cities. the city completely underground. the city so high in the sky the only thing one could see was the poles that held it up. etc etc I read them over and over. before I go to bed

Is there anywhere more Calvino stories like this, I have bought two other books and found them self indulgent, verbose and much less interesting.

anything remotely like this?

anyone?

"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening..."

So writes Italo Calvino, in one of the more ethereal experimental books he wrote. While not as weird as a book made up of tarot card adventures, "Invisible Cities" is a story that defies easy classification -- it's soft, dreamlike narrative in which one man tells another about the magical cities he's seen. Or, possibly, has not seen.

The famous Venetian explorer Marco Polo arrives in the empire of Kublai Khan, and the two men become friends. In the evenings, Marco tells the Khan of many fabulous cities -- the grey metal and stone Fedora, the stilted Zenobia, the haunted moonlit Zobeide, the sensual and bejeweled Anastasia, the cloud-straddling Baucis, the watery Esmeralda, a city of dead people known as Adelma, the dirt-choked Argia, the hazy rose-tinted Irene, and many others.

"Invisible Cities" isn't really a story so much as a series of beautiful pictures-in-prose. It's like we're watching Calvino paint us portraits of his fantasy cities with his words -- and except for Kublai Khan and Marco Polo occasionally conversing about trade, travel or chess, there is no actual plot here. It's just gorgeous portraits of imaginary cities.

And therein lies its charm. Calvino came up with dozens of fantastical cities in here. Few if any of them could actually exist, but they are so suffused with sensual beauty ("its villas all of glass like aquariums where the shadows of dancing girls with silvery scales swim...") and darkness ("All corpses, dried in such a way that the skeleton remains sheathed in yellow skin, are carried down there, to continue their former activities...") that you don't care.

Instead, Calvino comes up with strange, weird and illogical ideas, such as a city with ho actual buildings, but lots of plumbing. There are cities of the dead and the unborn; cities of the sea, the air, the earth and the sunrise; cities where everyone is a stranger and steampunk cities rusted into oblivion. It's like he's opened a hundred doors to eerie other worlds, and let us take a single picture of each before the doors close.

"Invisible Cities" is not a book for people who like plot -- instead, it's a chance to immerse yourself in Italo Calvino's magical language and imagination.

Sometimes you aren't ready to read a book. My sister recommended Italo Calvino to me more than 10 years ago. My writing advisor a few years after that. I picked up "Invisible Cities" both times and put it back down again, finding it scattered and confusing. I found it again this week at my parents' place in Pittsburgh and devoured it each night, each dreamscape city building itself in my mind, breaking me down.

It's hard to say what the book is about. A conversation between Marco Polo and Kubla Khan at the twilight of his empire? Stories about cities and history? An ode to Venice? A meditation on time and memory and how going afar changes the near?

There is this passage:
"... 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 traveler'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 traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places."

Though I can't completely get my head around this passage, I am utterly moved, and delighted. Perhaps I needed to go travelling for years for these words to resonate. Or to become a writer.

However, even with such a little book (less than 200 pages) and a lyrical and philosophical writing style, I found the city descriptions slightly repetitive, and some of the conversations as well. But I kept reading, feeling like there were secret messages. Like this wondrous passage, a call to a calling, a purpose in life:

"There are two ways to escape suffering the inferno of the living. 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 the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

I'm sure Mr. Calvino had an ordering scheme, or reasons for the categories of cities he chose. I couldn't decipher them, and I'm not sure whether any of that narrative stuff even matters. He is a philosopher, and an artist of the highest order. I highly recommend this book.

This book was recommended to me by a fellow traveler, and I will be in his debt for quite awhile!

The back cover of my edition said the only bad part of this book was having to describe it to another person. They are absolutely right. The short description is that Marco Polo is describing different cities to a foreigner emperor. As it turns out, they are all different characterizations of his home town in Venice.

Each description is only a page or two long. Any longer however and you would get bogged down in the language. As the descriptions come in small amounts, the reader is able to absorb the intricacies of this version of Venice before moving onto the next.

What I really loved about the novel though was the commonalities about cities and structure which was touched upon throughout. Like people, there is both a uniqueness and universality to places. While I might step into a city and feel like it's home, or I've been there before, the city is still unique in it's buildings or stores or language or layout. Yet, there is something deeper which resonates within each of us.

One can interpret the different passages in a number of different ways, and I suspect that when I reread the novel, I will get a different interpretation as well. I simply loved how beautifully it was written, and the way it made me think.Thus, I highly recommend this novel for the reader that wants a bit more than the usual fanfare.

I only just discovered Calvino's writing, and now I need more of it.

At the exterior, Invisible Cities forms a conversation between Marco Polo and the Chinese emperor, a travelogue of sorts, describing the wonders that Polo has seen. Each section of the book starts with a brief interlude that continues the conversation, then presents a handful of city descriptions, a page or two each. Instead of an atlas, though, think of this more as an urban form of ancient bestiary, filled with fabulous and improbable descriptions of things that never were and never could be - at least not when the descriptions are taken at their most literal. But, whatever their failings in plain hard fact, each of those mythical beasts embodied some blend of the teller's experience, aspirations, fears, and dreams, sometimes grown from a seed of reality.

That's how Calvino describes the city - or, it turns out, The City. Each vignette seemingly describes a different locale with its own unique geography, architecture, and customs. It could equally well describe the speaker's many experiences of his own home: the riches, the poverty, the bustle, the solitude, the comforts, the senses of loss and alienation. Through that, Calvino reminds the reader that no one description can be completely and exclusively true, and invites the reader to tease out and characterize the many conflicting and interlocking truths in any experience - and, by extension, the conflicting and interlocking truths evoked by different observers.

There's one thing I know I never fully grasped in this book - perhaps something utterly insignificant, perhaps not. The table of contents offers subtleties in numbering and characterization of city descriptions for which I never found meaning. Perhaps that will come clear (or at least clearer) on some future reading. There's sure to be at least one, sooner or later.

-- wiredweird

Invisible Cities is neither a traditional novel, nor is it simply a collection of short stories. Instead, is a hybrid - a series of descriptions of impossible or magical cities is held together by a fictional conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Marco Polo gives fantastical descriptions of the cities he's visited: a city entirely underground, a city suspended by ropes over an abyss, a city that serves as a museum to all the possible alternate versions of itself. As Polo tells his stories to the Khan, the reader begins to recognize a common unifying theme to the descriptions. Although the work is highly academic, I believe it can be enjoyed on multiple levels. The descriptions of the cities are enjoyable both in their literal sense and for the metaphors that they evoke. I think the depth of analysis will depend on each individual reader, but one doesn't need to understand each nuisance to derive enjoyment from this work. Overall, this book takes a unique approach to illuminating both historical and modern urban life and society.

In this dream-like book (not a novel) Marco Polo regales Kubla Khan with stories of imaginary cities in Khan's kingdom which Polo has either visited or heard of. The individual tales are evocative of Tales Of The Arabian Nights or Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan. There is no plot, but mere flights of fantastic architecture and the ways that people inhabit them. At one point, Polo tells Khan that all the cities are merely representations of his home in Venice. I can see this in many of the cities, but others escape me. I enjoyed this beautiful book but the reason eludes me. Perhaps it is the very elusive nature of the writing that sucks me in.

I first showed interest in Italo Calvino when I saw him compared to a favorite author of mine, JORGE LUIS BORGES.

After reading this book, I can clearly see similarities between the two. But let's not forget one fact: Borges came first. Therefore, much of what I read in this book was nothing new.

In particular, I immediately recognized the layout of INVISIBLE CITIES as being loosely modeled off of Borges' BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS. In the latter work, Borges wrote short but sweet histories of the many different fantasy creatures in the world. In this book, also using a mere page or two, Calvino explores the many different types of cities, which all happen to be the same one, just approached from different directions.

Where Calvino puts his own personal twist on this formula is by adding some narrative and dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Even with this addition, this book does not read like a traditional story. But there is much in the way of thought-provoking passages and imaginative imagery. It was when my mind could really visualize these possible cities, when I was forced to stop and ask myself questions, that I felt the book worked.

However, Calvino also made a few decisions in his writing that damage the consistency of his work. For example, the scenes between Khan and Polo are clearly rooted in ancient history. So are most of the city-descriptions. But then out of left-field he'll come along and describe a city with airplanes, pistons, and hydraulics with no immediate explanation for this sudden change in technology and time.
Going back to the Khan and Polo scenes, most of them are formatted like a regular novel. But then starting around page 100, Calvino ditches that format for one that looks more suited for a play . . . then switches back and forth between the two a couple times without any explanation.

In my opinion, if it weren't for the Khan and Polo scenes, this book could have easily been called THE BOOK OF IMAGINARY CITIES, where a reader could open to a page at random and enjoy the sometimes odd and imaginative ways of viewing cities. This is how Borges himself wanted one to read his IMAGINARY BEINGS book.
However, the very existence of the Khan and Polo scenes forces one to read this from cover to cover like most other books.

There are moments of brilliance, statements that may put your critical thinking-cap into high-gear but I honestly don't think this book turned out as good as it could have.

This book has a unique way of telling a story, for Calvino sets Marco Polo as the storyteller for Kubai Khan with his descriptions of cities he has visited before arriving in China. Each city is described with imaginative symbolic elaboration, not only of the physical structure and landscape, but the emotions and “sense” of each city., its skies, waters, people, memories, and basic nature. Each citybecomes, in a sense, a unique person—and really only one. Great writing!

Eschewing all conventional literary forms, Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" is a series of short sketches of imaginary cities visited by the mercurial explorer Marco Polo, who tells his tales to Kublai Khan, the saturnine Mongol emperor who is nearing the end of his triumphant days. But this is a work of anachronistic fantasy, and it soon becomes apparent that the cities have nothing to do with the 13th century or the Mongol empire, but exist in all times and places, or only in the mind.
The roughly fifty cities that Marco Polo describes are of such wild variety and curious construction, one has to wonder where Calvino gets his inspiration (aside from the obvious influence of Borges). Marco Polo tells of Dorothea, a city that is divided like a tic-tac-toe board by four intersecting canals; Despina, a city that appears as a ship to a traveler approaching by camel, and a camel to a traveler approaching by ship; the eerily surreal Armilla, consisting of nothing but water pipes ending in plumbing fixtures; Olinda, a city which blossoms like a flower in concentric circles, evoking visions of self-generating fractals.
Some of the cities seem to symbolize concepts that apply to the real world. Especially portentous is the "spider-web" city of Octavia, which hangs from a rope suspended between two mountain precipices; its inhabitants are less uncertain of their future than those of other cities because they at least *know* that someday the rope will break. And Perinthia, a city that was designed under celestial guidance but whose inhabitants have turned out grotesque, offers ironic commentary on science mixing with religion.
Encompassing the sights, sounds, aromas, and sentiments of a world of human experience, "Invisible Cities" is a feast for the senses, beautifully penned by one of the truly great fabulists of the twentieth century.

Invisible Cities is, at its most basic, a constant dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan as Polo recounts his journeys throughout the lands and describes the cities that the Khan will never see himself. At its most complex, this book is about the make-up of our own lives, the level of insight wrapped around the fantastic cities is simply amazing.
A recurring theme through the novel is that of the sadness associated with life, and the general melancholy awareness that afflicts any place. Octavia, the spider-web city, is a city hanging between two mountains, existing entirely through a system of webbing and nets. The inhabitants, Marco Polo writes, do not live in fear of their existence like other city-dwellers, for they know that the netting will only last so long. Almost every city carries with it a similar lesson, a similar warning, a similar metaphor. None of the cities are truly happy, their single exception serving not to highlight their uniqueness, but to instead show that where they are not strong, they are weak.
Here, to show an example of the sheer originality and wonder of these cities, are some examples:
A city replicated many times, and when the occupants become disillusioned with their jobs and wives, they all simply get up and move to the next city to take up new occupations, new wives or husbands and new lives, and the cycle begins anew, but the cit, of all the invisible cities, remains always the same. A city where there is nothing but the water plumbing making up the dwellings, and naked women bathe in bathtubs and showers suspended in the air by nothing but their piping's.
To me, the point of this book was to highlight a good or a bad side to human life and embody this within a particular city. Then, each aspect can be examined and shown to be lacking, or sufficient, based entirely on its own merits. No single city could truly exist, but instead each aspect of the cities exist within those we live in today, and by isolating and examining these we can perhaps make our own lives - and the lives of others - better for it. The constant dialogues between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo serve only to reinforce this belief; the two men often speaking at each other in metaphors and life-lessons. In particular, the city of Eusapia is amazing, I won't describe it though, I'll just say that its description alone is worth the price of admission.
This book gets my absolute highest recommendation.

I so wanted to love this book, but it took me over two months just to finish it despite its short length. That is not to say it was all bad! Calvino's structure is that of Marco Polo recounting for Kublai Khan brief vignettes about various cities and towns through which he has supposedly passed on his travels. I couldn't help but marvel at the sheer imaginative power it must have taken to create so many places, and I give props to Calvino for that. In addition, his prose is wonderful, with paragraphs frequently taking unexpected twists at the end. Many sentient points about human nature-points which transcend time and culture-were subtly inserted, and lent the book an added soulful element.

Two things gave me grief. First, despite the marvelous variety of locales, an entire book of city descriptions grew redundant very quickly. The author's creativity and prose carried me happily through about the first six or eight cities, and then the subject matter began to flag.

The second aspect was the magical realism employed in the book. Mention of objects such as sky scrapers, carousel horses, and underground trains, which did not exist in the era in which the book was written, offended the historian in me. Rather than fantastical, they just felt like poor fact checking to me. By the end of the book, entire modern cities, in countries yet to be discovered, began appearing in Kublai Khan's atlas; it all rang very inconceivable to me. I have decided that books in which characters travel back in time and bring modern knowledge and objects with them delight me, but books in which knowledge of technology and modern devices appear long before their advent simply feel jarring.

Had I read one of these pieces, individually, in a magazine or blog, I would likely have been full of compliments. For the most part, the book simply did not work for me because it was too much of the same.

For many people Invisible Cities is their favorite Calvino novel. While it is not quite mine (I prefer If on a Winter's Night a Traveller and The Baron in the Trees) no one would deny this book's singular beauty and charm. Marco Polo and Kublai Khan discuss a host of cities, which are in fact all just one city. In a series of exquisite tales, Calvino tells of Cities and memory, Cites and desire, Cities and signs, Thin cities, Trading Cities, Cities and Eyes, Cities and Names, Cities and the Dead, Cities and the Sky, Continuous Cities, Hidden Cities, all arranged in such a manner as to remind one of Pascal and Fibonnaci.
Calvino's ingenuity is striking. There is the memory city of Isidora, the dreamed off city of youthful passion and pleasure which is only encountered by the old who remember it. There is the stilt city of Thin Zenobia. There is the city of Eusapia who made beneath it an underground necropolis for its dead who in turn has so influenced the surface that one can no longer tell who is alive or dead. There is the continous city of Leonia which throws out everything each day and replaces it with the completely new. I think my favorite is the hidden city of Theodora, which after successfully exterminating all the vermin, found itself plagued with sphinxes, unicorns, hydras and basilisks. An unforgettable book.

I took a college class recently which featured this book. I found the concept behind this book original, clever, and intelligent. A number of reviewers here have used the word "pretentious," but I don't see it as such at all. I will warn you now however, that if you are looking for a plot, you won't find one in this book. But the story that nevertheless unfolds in you mind, is indescribable.
The backdrop for the story is an imaginary Marco Polo telling an eqully imaginary Kublai Kahn about all of the wondrous cities he has visited in his travels across the known world... but what the reader gets is far from "known." Instead, through Polo's vivid descriptions, Calvino takes you on a journey through a number of mythical cities, each more fantastic and surreal than the last. Slowly the reader comes to understand that the cities Polo describes, do not per-se exist in reality, but in his imagination and dreams. Time, we find, has no meaning to these characters who we find later are as mythical as the cities that they describe.
In summary, Calvino tells a hypnotic and poetic story with his imaginative depictions of these fantasy cities. The book is pure imagination, with no plot to get in the way. It will give your imagination a well-needed workout. It is different than your average novel, and it will certainly have an acquired taste to it, but if you are willing to try, you will not be disappointed. If you enjoy this book, I would also recommend Lightman's "Einstein's Dreams," which is similar in style, just as imaginative, and twice as good!

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.

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.

If you are looking for a novel that goes something like Hero has a problem made worse by the villain and they have conflict and stuff happens leading to a climax and mostly everything is resolved in the end, then Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino is not for you.

But if you are looking for a different kind of book, then Invisible Cities is worth a try.

The story (if you can call it that) centers on Marco Polo telling Kublai Khan of the cities he has seen on his travels. As the novel progresses, it's not clear whether Marco Polo actually saw the cities, if he's making it all up, or even if Kublai Khan believes any of what he's hearing or not.

Marco Polo describes fantastic cities, painting a vivid portrait in just a page or two. One sits on stilts, one's boundaries are ever-shifting boundaries, one is simply pipes and plumbing with no walls or roofs. Another is described as a carpet with twisting patterns which are really a map of the city. Everyone sees it differently, depending on what twists of fate have come into their lives. Following that theme, another city is built on a dream of chasing a woman through a town, another uses the stars as its blueprint.

What makes this book so enjoyable is the sheer gorgeousness of the writing. The descriptions of the cities are almost like prose poems. There is lush detail ("the river green with crocodiles"), or this sentence:

"And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs at seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of the scaffolding, "Darling, let me dip into it," to a young serving maid who holds up a dish of ragout under the pergola, happy to serve it to the umbrella-maker who is celebrating a successful transaction, a white lace parasol bought to display at the races by a great lady in love with an officer who has smiled at her taking the last jump, happy man, and still happier his horse, flying over the obstacles, seeing a francolin flying in the sky, happy bird freed from its cage by a painter happy at being painted it feather by feather, speckled with red and yellow ..."

Another memorable city waged war on fleas and termites, and various species of mutant rats, not suspecting that it was threatened by monsters: sphinxes, griffons, dragons, basilisks and more, all seeking to possess the city. This brought to my mind the image of our own society, obsessed with trivia, ignoring the real issues that threaten our way of life.

This, I think, is the key to the book: the images it creates in our minds. Invisible Cities isn't a quick read, but one to be savored. I admit, there were some passages I read three or four times and still didn't get. Others were so vivid, like the one quoted above, I could see the crowds in the streets, individuals living their lives, acting and reacting to each other. This is a book that invites you to read between the lines and form your own images.

Calvino's intent may have been summarized by Marco Polo. "`I speak and speak,' Marco says, `but the listener retains only the words he is expecting...It is not the voice that commands the story, it is the ear.'"

Calvino's INVISIBLE CITIES is very original in concept and execution. A fictional Marco Polo tells a fictional Kublai Khan about the cities he has visited in his travels, all having female names and all having fantastically unique and in many cases, disturbing qualities. During the course of his recollections, Kublai and Polo digress on various topics relating to those cities, the state of Kublai's empire, and the symbolic meaning of it all.

The effect is quite hypnotic, as each city in turn, through physical descriptions of it's architecture and culture presents a unique perspective on mankind. Calvino is saying things about modern as well as ancient civilization. Each city is a city of the mind..a city everyone knows, has known, or will know.

This book is unique and thought provoking, but I did find it a bit repetitive in style. It kind of droned on. That's my only criticism.

I have only recently discovered the fantasies of Italo Calvino (1923--1984). Wow! What a wonderful imagination! I will review more of his books as I finish them, but I will start with _Invisible Cities_ (1972). It would seem to be fairly loose and episodic in nature at first glance. The emperor Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo sit in a garden and converse. Young Marco tells of fabulous cities that he has seen (or might have seen). On page 43, Marco gently chides the Khan, telling him: "Sir, your mind has been wandering. This is precisely the city I was telling you about when you interrupted me". There is the suggestion that several of these cities may be one... or that all may be one. But I don't think so. The fifty-five cities described here are very individual places.

Some are places of particular signs:

Finally the journey leads to the city of Tamara. You penetrate it along streets thick with signboards jutting from the walls. The eye does not things but images of things that mean other things: pincers point out the tooth-drawer's house; a tankerd, the tavern; halberds, the barracks; scales, the grocers. Statues and shields depict lions, dolphins, towers, stars: a sign that something-- who knows what?-- has as its sign a lion or a dolphin or a tower or a star. (13)

Some cities were founded on desire:

They tell this tale of [Zobeiide's] foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running through an unknown city; she was seen from behind with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream, they set out in search of that city... (45)

Or, like the city of Dorothea, you may say say that desire is now imbedded in some cities:

And bearing in mind that the nubile girls of each quarter marry youths of other quarters and their parents exchange the goods that each family holds in monopoly-- bergamot, sturgeon roe, astrolabes, amethysts-- you can then work from these facts until you learn everything you wish about the city in the past, present, and future. (9)

Some cities play with your memory:

Zora has the quality of remaining in your memory point by point, in its sucession of streets, of houses along the streets, and of doors and windows in the houses, though nothing in them possesses a special beauty or rarity. Zora's secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced. (15)

Some cities are notable for their architecture, from the sparse:

The fact remains that [Armilla] has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be: a forest of pipes that end in taps, showers, spouts overflows. Against the sky a lavabo's white stands out or a bathtub, or some other porcelain... (49)

...to the aquatic: In Esmeralda, city of water, a network of canals and a network of streets span and intersect each other. To go from one place to another you have to always the choice between land or boat: and the shortest point between two points in Esmerelda is not a straight line but a zigzag that ramifies in tortuous option routes, the ways that open to each passerby are never two, but many... (88)

... to the organic:

Orlinda is certainly not the only city that grows in concentric circles, like tree trunks which each year add one more ring. But in other cities there remains in the center, the old narrow girdle of the walls from which the withered spires rise, the towers, the tiled roofs, the domes, while the new quarters sprawl around them like a loosened belt. Not Orlinda: the old walls expand bearing the old quarters with them, enlarged, but maintaining their proportions on a broader horizon at the edges of the city; they surround the slightly newer quarters... (129)

I said earlier that the book seems to be loosely episodic. But a closer look at the book reveals that there is a very careful structure to it. There are nine chapters. Chapters one and nine contain ten descriptions of cities.. Chapters two through eight contain five descriptions of cities. Each chapter contains a dialogue between the Great Khan and Marco and the end. There are several other dialogues scattered about in an irregular manner in the chapter interiors. The dialogues themselves contain fascinations and contradictions. I will note only one example here:

"Your cities do not exist." [says Kublai Khan.]"Perhaps they have never existed. It is sure they will never exist again. Why do you amuse yourself with consolatory fables? I know well that my empire is rotting like a corpse in a swamp, whose contagion infects the crows that peck at it as well as the bamboo that grows, fertilized by its humors. Why not speak to me of this? Why do you lie to the emperor of the Tartars, foreigner?" (59)

But the Khan will also say: "And yet I know...that my empire is made of the stuff of crystals, its molecules arranged in a perfect pattern. Amid the surge of the elements, a splendid hard diamond takes shape, an immense, faceted, transparent mountain. Why do your travel impressions stop at disappointing appearances, never catching this implacable process? Why do you linger over inessential melancholies? Why do you hide from your emperor the grandeur of his destiny?" (60)

Can we find some patterns in this diversity? Let us start with the trivial. The book is filled with anachronisms. Cities contain trains, petrolium refineries, manhole covers, cable cars, shooting galleries, and other items not known in Marco Polo's time. For that matter, the historical Kubla Khan would probably never speak of molecules and elements. But then, we are dealing with a philosophical as well as a poetical novel.

What does the novel tell us about the nature of reality? Are the cities real or imaginary? Is the Kahn's empire rotting away, or is it enduring like a diamond mountain? Or is it like something else altogether? I think that Calvino means for us to see that the search for truth is a complex task, that truth is not a simple-minded affair. But I think that he also means for us to see that the quest for truth is not a meaningless quest, either. There may indeed be some point to sipping tea in a garden and talking about cities that might-have-been.

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."

Though exceedingly short (166 pages), Invisible Cities by the author Italo Calvino is so densely constructed that it takes just as long, if not longer to understand, much less even finish the book than it would normally with a three hundred page novel. Indeed, after finishing Calvino's work I'm convinced I'll have to read it again just to even be convinced that I even read it in the first place.

But I think that sentiment speaks somewhat to the essence of the work itself. Briefly stated, Calvino's work is based around the visitations between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, specifically their time spent in conversation about the cities Polo has traveled between in the great Khan's empire. The Khan, you understand, needs his amusement.

But as we progress through each of Polo's travels, we are increasingly forced to consider whether Polo is giving us the whole story, whether he actually has been to the distant places he so ably illustrates, whether they even exist at all. Fascinating is the interplay between Kublai Khan and Polo; was Calvino creating a dialogue among historical equals, or was Polo dangling a metaphorical carrot before the flummoxed Khan in an attempt to be clever or save his own skin?

Calvino, sadly no longer among us, equally confounds with his imagery in questioning just what exactly constitutes a city. His writing definitely fits the classification of fabulist lit, similar to magical realism, in which surreality takes center stage. It is a grand labyrinth, a philosophical conundrum that Calvino so artfully evokes.

Can I tell you how much I love Italo Calvino?
When you come to Calvino you are probably lost, tired, or under duress from an overzealous English professor. You think, what is the style of this man? About what does he write? And why are the chapters so short? And could he not choose more hideous type in which to set the names of those chapters?
Ah, now you are beginning to truly love Calvino. For it is only when you recognize that the man maddens you no end, that his "style which is no style" (as he says of himself in IOAWNAT) is gentle and beautiful and feels like an old friend-but an old friend that you never met-that you can truly begin to live inside one of his novels. And you will never want to leave. Savor this book. Read it slowly, one magic city at a time. Exist in it for weeks, turning the lessons like foreign coins over in your mind.
And get the book in paperback so it won't damage the walls.
Bon voyage.

I had never read any Calvino before this spring and loved If On a Winter's Night a Traveler. Calvino writes like a more patient Borges, exploring the passages one at a time branching off the main cave gallery. In this breathtakingly elegant work, Calvino shows us cities rife with contradiction, told by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan, with dialogues bookending the city descriptions. The short, meditative reflections on imagined cities gives the book a nice cadence, a postcard-view of the city, usually with its photo-negative or reflection or inversion presented afterwards. Calvino is clearly a master at this type of wordsmanship, while remaining true to his genuine emotion of decline, loss and heartbreak. At one point, the Khan asks Polo about the city of his birth, Venice: "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little." (87) Most of the stories focus on the various perceptions of cities which differ depending upon how one comes to the city, which part is glimpsed first, whether one grows up in the city or merely travels through it. Overall, a wonderful collection of descriptions, a jewelry-box of imagined delights, a phantasmagoria.

Calvino takes different aspects of human nature, urban planning, fears and dreams, or existence itself, and builds an entire city on the foundation of that idea. These are the cities Marco Polo describes to the emperor, Kublai Khan.

There's a lot of cities described here (all with women's names). At first I found them whimsical and without much gravity, but as the book progressed, the descriptions seemed to take a more substantive turn--sometimes going dark, sometimes curious. I found I liked the book more and more the deeper I read.

This is quite possibly the most striking novel I've had the pleasure of reading in the last few years. Calvino beautifully spins a tale of an imaginary encounter between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, in which Polo describes all the cities of his long travels. Calvino's exquisite prose slowly reveals cities beyond imagination to the reader, all the while weaving subtle currents of longing and regret into the fabric of his tale. The novel shines magnificently as a study and examination of our strange relationship with memory. As Polo tells Khan, "It is not the voice that tells the story, but the ear." As Calvino also notes, the best way to really maintain and preserve our memories is to leave them be. Only in this way can we avoid the temptation of returning to them and likely distorting and warping them from their original state. As Calvino skillfully reveals the slow and hidden crumbling of our memories, you'll find yourself hypnotized and drawn into the amazing world he's created. Please do yourself a favor and buy a copy of this book NOW.

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.

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno 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 the inferno, are no inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

Either Italo speaks to you, or he doesn't. I found this book to be magical and timeless-- full of beautiful prose and lyrical truths.

I learned of Italo Calvino from a girl too cool and too smart and too busy for me; we had one ill-fated date, at a too-loud bar, followed by greasy food at Ben's Chili Bowl neither of us wanted. The words we didn't say were interrupted by the Ethiopian cabbie, who-- after dropping her off, instead of taking me home-- drove me to an Ethiopian restaurant and made a proposal of marriage. I have nothing more of her but books read and unread, a litany of thoughts unspoken, vague wonderings. That said, it was worth it, to have discovered Italo.

If this books does not make you yearn to learn Italian just to hear the flow of the text in its native tongue, nothing will. Some complain of lack of characters and lack of plot. "Pfaw!" I say to them. This is a book beyond such petty measurements. This is a short book, yet it will take you days to read it as each chapter, often no more than 2-3 pages, some as short as 1, takes you to a different experience of the human soul. Have you even felt constrained by your past, your relationships, your desires? All of this is here. This is not a "novel" in the classical sense, but rather a mode of exploration of what it means to be human, often disappointed, occaisionally enlightened, always questioning. This is a work of crystal, delicate, crafted, light. Come back to it again and again to learn!

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.

In this slight book I found poetry, philosophical discourse, the stakes to a game of chess, and one of the finest last lines to a novel: "...seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space." A beautiful affirmation of humanity! This novel abounds with thoughtful and deep-inside-wrenching remarks, interlaced with poetic descriptions of countless imaginary cities that live and breath the characteristics of the all-too-real cities of the world today. The progression of city-experiences in this novel reminded me a little of the snapshot scenarios in Calvino's Marcovaldo. BUT, this book is still completely different! This book spurred my own imagination as Marco Polo's and Kublai Kahn's are intertwined within the covers. A wonder at many different levels and will be added to the very short list of books that I re-read every few years.

I read this decades ago, when I was barely more than a child.

It is a brief volume. I recall that I burned through the first 50 pages before I even realized what was going on. Then I had to start over from the beginning so that I could really begin to appreciate it.

This is a novel that fulfills all the usual requirements of a novel. But just not in any of the usual ways of a novel. There is poetry in it. And ideas. Ideas that shed light on ideas. And ideas that shed light on ideas, and maybe on people, but definitely on ideas.

If you want something different, but not painful, then this might be it. But it wants to make you think, as Calvino usually does, so it might seem a little bit boring or tedious until you make the effort to try to understand.

There's trying, and there's succeeding. All you have to do with this one is to try. Whether or not you succeed doesn't matter. If you just try, you'll have fun.

Or at least that's what I recall from decades ago when I still expected greatness in this world.

YMMV,

&B^)

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.

Perhaps one of the oddest things about the reception of "Invisible Cities" is that it was a finalist for a Nebula Award. Although mathematics and architecture figure prominently, the book really isn't science fiction, and while it is certainly fanciful, it's a stretch to call this meditation a fantasy novel. Instead, Marco Polo's descriptions of 55 imaginary cities are clever, whimsical prose poems, mixing brainy puns and shrewd aphorisms. Calvino constructs cities the way Poe assembles dreams; "Invisible Cities" is the full-length work Borges never wrote.

The comparison to Borges is instructive, because what works in the short form begins to show signs of strain in this novella. Calvino sprinkles bons mots and truisms liberally amongst the tightly structured chapters (whose interwoven, enumerated headings might build, some readers argue, a sine wave or a skyline or something meaningful). Reading the book is to waver back and forth between admiring the clever wordplay and recognizing its cynical candor: "The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea." "There is no language without deceit." A city made entirely of pipes; a city divided for the dead, the living, the unborn; a city whose trash expands outward, trapping its citizens within; a city that looks just like the city you just left; a city that exists only in old postcards depicting a different city that never really existed--you'll recognize aspects of every city in each of these cities, or (more precisely) you'll recognize Venice.

Quite frankly, this isn't my thing; although parts made me laugh and parts made me think, I found "Invisible Cities" as repetitive and cute as it is innovative and profound, its substance a slave to its structure, its philosophy more dimestore than rigorous. (The metafiction of "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" and the allegory of "The Baron in the Trees" are more to my liking.) But this book will certainly gratify readers who long for fiction that aspires to Emersonian grandeur or who would prefer something more expansive than the bite-sized sketches offered by Borges.

Calvino is wonderful, and Invisible Cities is representative of his brilliance. Although not my favorite of his works, it is artfully crafted and beautifully executed. It is neither a novel nor a poem, but instead more of a "prose poem," if such a thing may truly exist. And in fact, it is not just one poem, but many: each one representing another feature of a single cosmopolis. His images flee from the limited grounding of physical description and instead float loftily in the realm of ideas and imagination. Because of this, Invisible Cities may be best understood as a demonstration of the artist's imagination, since each description--each "city"--is like an abstract painting.

Although I enjoyed this text, I found it difficult at times to follow. Calvino is clearly far more intelligent and crafty than I am, so I take the blame. However, take this as a warning for those of you who may be similar to me (better with prose than with poetry). Nonetheless, his images can be appreciated if not fully comprehended.

I highly recommend this text if for nothing else than being able to catch a glimpse of what it looks like when a brilliant man holds a paintbrush with his imagination.

Seldom do I put down a book I have started, but halfway through I stopped. The miniature metaphysical portraits of cities were going nowhere. While several had engrossing features, the corpus felt disjointed and pointless. It made me appreciate even more the power and genius of Borges, who has a similar sensibility but used it to inform genuine insights and conclusions.

"Calvino is just one of those writers that make me think to myself, "Yes! That's exactly how I feel!" at every phrase. "Oh, jeepers! Italo and I are, like, twin souls! We're exactly the same!" I'm sitting here furiously writing down quotes into my little journal and find out I'm just rewriting the whole novel."

Read the rest of the review (and then some) over here:

http://litbeetle.com/2013/06/04/on-calvinos-invisible-cities-and-relocation-to-a-newold-town/

Calvino is an excellent writer who takes the reader on a nutritious, recursive exploration of self by ocular observation amidst the bottomless variations of desire, indulgence and abstinence... with imperious circumspection. He writes like Stanley Kubrick directs.

Invisible Cities is a timeless masterpiece of intellectual, romantic and political irony. Simply put, this is a story that spans a chronicle of set narratives in the ancient oral tradition. This fictional narration of wondrous and fantastical adventures among cities of yon and gone are conveyed as seen through the eyes of Marco Polo and retold as being heard through the ears of Kublai Khan ... exultant, economically sparse and yet luxurious on the senses and sensibilities of our most universal desires for adventure, conquest, possessions and the ultimate weight they bring by being objects once desired and now cuckolding the possessor to maintain and sustain them as part of a bolder whole... and across the grandest exposition of human civilization that is fictional Cities, little discrete gems and spheres among grander expanses of civilized space and time.

Whether we envision our own personal empire as cobbled together from things or thoughts, we are duly changed in the contemplation of all that we surmise, whether or not we consume and administer them...

Marco Polo arrived in Katai (now China) by traveling as long as 3 years and a half. He would be staying at the Kublai Khan's court for 17 years as ambassador and governor. Thanks to his experience and travels book the commercial enterprise will develop into the Far East during the next centuries. Most of the cities Polo had written of don't exist in the modern era. Some changed their name. Kublai Khan was chief of an endless empire whose capital he established in Khanbalik (Peking). He ruled from Mongolia to Tibet, from China to Birman: was he a right and wise sovereign too? Polo would answer affirmative, but we know he had been an employee by Kublai who paid the duties to him for a fortune! It's common knowledge in Italy that the memories of Polo were titled 'The Million' to remember such a wealth. This is the history... "Why do you lie, foreigner?". Kublai Khan noticed all the cities Polo told him were seeming to resemble as though the passing from one to another shouldn't imply a journey but an exchange of elements only. Promptly Khan was going to browse on his atlas the maps of the cities which threaten from nightmares and curses: Enoch, Babylon, Yahoo, Butua, Brave New World... And this is "The Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino. Maybe you too, while surfing the Net, realize the differences are going to vanish and each city looks like all other cities, an out-and-out dust swarms into the continents. Cities akin to Dante's Inferno? Read the book or write to me to get answer!

Invisible Cities provides an abstract if not surreal vision into the many perspectives of the city. Set as conversation between the infamous Marco Polo and Kublai Khan Invisible Cities documents Marco Polo's vivid and imaginative descriptions of the cities that he has seen. Author Italo Calvino provides many philosophical musings regarding the nature of Marco Polo's travels and brings to question the very essence of existence and our conceptions of place.

Marco Polo's descriptions of cities are remarkable. He tells of each city not only through the lens of his own personal perspective, but he goes to great lengths to describe how the residents in each place understand the city and what emotions they attach to their location. As he recalls each city Marco Polo manages a certain detachment through which he describes the movement of each city's residents as if they were ants occupying an ant hill.

Calvino creates a complex mental puzzle in the conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan that forces the reader to come to grips with the transient nature of physical space. As Invisible Cities progresses the reader becomes aware of the different emotions and conceptions that we all attach to cities and places and how our feelings can transform the physical manifestations of those places into an entirely different existence than what others experience.

Calvino is poetic in his descriptions of splendor and ruin. Invisible Cities is worth reading for the descriptive language alone. Marco Polo's descriptions make his places come alive and create a truly immersive experience through the use of Calvino's powerful imagery.

One of my favorite books of all time. Calvino mesmerizes with his tale of the Kublai Khan and Marco Polo seeing worlds of cities beyond imagination and metaphor. You'll see ancient cities in your mind, you'll gain insights into the ruins, you'll see the cities of Calvino's dreams. Nothing is as powerful as a dreamer. Calvino's dreams tops all.

forever,
Annie

Annie Lanzillotto
author of "L is for Lion: an italian bronx butch freedom memoir" SUNY Press
and "Schistsong" BORDIGHERA Press

www.annielanzillotto.com

L Is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir (SUNY series in Italian/American Culture)
Schistsong (Via Folios)
Blue Pill
Carry My Coffee (Live)
Eleven Recitations

I had the good fortune to read "Invisible Cities" while in Venice and other parts of Northern Italy, where I felt like I was visiting many of the cities described in the book. This book is a tiny little gem collection, with descriptions of each city stretching your brain in a different direction. However, I do feel that some of the chapters are repetitive, particularly on the theme of cities that contain their opposites. For that, I have taken away one star in my review. It reminded me very much of Alan Lightman's book "Einstein's Dreams" which I would also recommend (he's no Calvino, but the format and brain-stretching are similar). My favorite Calvino book will forever remain "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler," which if you do not own you should immediately order a dozen copies and pass them out to everyone you know.

Gore Vidal, on the back cover of my copy (or the library's copy, to be more precise -- which was checked out under my friend Adan's account, because I couldn't prove that I'm a resident of San Francisco, which, I guess, I'm not - technically speaking, but still..) of *Invisible Cities* says something to the effect that a book's content is the most difficult thing to summarize, and that this book in particular presents a major challenge in that respect. And then, underneath that quote, is the unattributed summary of the book, which reads:
"Italo Calvino's dazzling imagination and extraordinary intellegence combine here in an enchanting series of stories about the evolution of the universe. He makes characters out of mathematical formulae and simple cellular structures. They disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms, and have a love life."
Wow.
I met Calvino through the book *On a Winter's Night, a Traveler*, which I fell in love with, and which pursuaded me to consider Calvino as one of my favorite authors - after reading just one book. When I searched for other books of his at the Richmond library in San Francisco, only *Invisible Cities*, a slim volume with an uninviting endorsement from Vidal and a bizarre, esoteric summary, was available. The first few pages revealed that the book is, in fact, about cities. Each city is granted two or three pages of text, then ostensibly forgotten. The cities are arranged in a formulaic system of chapters with serial titles - 9 chapters, each divided into a set of sub-chapters, each of which is devoted to one city, except the first and last subchapter of each chapter, which describes a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. The subchapters are given generic sounding titles, such as "Cities and Memory," "Cities and Desire," or "Cities and the Sky." These titles are reused for different cities, creating an alliance of "Cities and Signs," or "Trading Cities." The structure of the Table of Contents reveals a lot about the nature of the book - the serialization of chapters, the lateral movement of serialed titles. It could be described as molecular, mathematical, organic: a pristine, crystalline, geometric construction of text.
Wow. (the last sarcastic wow)
I wasn't looking for a poetic novel about math. I wanted more Calvino, whoever he is. The unique but somewhat sterile organization of the book did not immediately appeal to me, but as I began to read, it became obvious that the book was about more than numbers and symmetry. These cities are kaleidoscopic: in each one, you can see your own city, every city you've ever seen, every city you've ever dreamed, nothing you've ever thought possible, localized systems of life and death, personalities built on an exaggerated human characteristic, and cities as living creatures. Midway through the book I thought I'd try and record some of the themes that I came across.
Chapter 4-3: Parasitic city
Chapter 4-2: Momentum of mentality; depression
Chapter 4-1: Authority of Tradtion; Self-determination; delusion
Chapter 4 (epilogue): probablity; infinity; random processes (1,000,000 monkeys typing for a million years)
Chapter 8-5: Relativity
Chapter 8-4: Black Hole
Chapter 8-3: Expansion of the Universe
Chapter 8-1: the Big Bang
But not only does every city have a theme (and I'm sure you will find your own); there is an embedded lesson as well. *Invisible Cities* reads like a Physics book that has been absorbed by the Tao Te Ching. The lessons of life are offered in the complexity of nature - the universe has figured it out; all we need to do is listen.
Wow.

I love this book. In it, Marco Polo describes to Kubla Khan all the cities of his kingdom, all of which are, in fact, the same city. The book is imaginative, magical, and rich in gorgeous imagery. It offers a whole repertoire of ways of seeing and demonstrates how language can create multiple worlds.

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.

In architecture school, I had to draw these cities from Calvino's descriptions. His amazingly descriptive and yet vauge recollections made for a great jumping off point.

Each chapter of 'Invisible Cities' is an evocative recollection of a fanciful and fantastic city. The descriptions are perfectly distilled, strikingly vivid yet dreamy prose photographs.

Loosen your ties to reality and let this book take you. Read it uncritically and let the scenery wash over you. There is no plot. There are no characters. This is a book about the intersection of reality, language, and the senses. It isn't to be missed.

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.

Consisting entirely of descriptions of fantastical cities supposedly reported by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan, Calvino's fiction is sui generis, a completely original mixture of fable and philosophy that is even more imaginative than his more critical theory-oriented "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler." This is the kind of novel Borges might have written. A celebration of the unbridled imagination, "Invisible Cities" is also, I am convinced, a secret love letter to a single city: the imaginary dream-city of Venice, a place that exists partly as its own reflection in the sea.

Immediately I can detect the luminous presence of magic in this slim volume. Although thin in pages, it is deep in meaning. Without much in the way of characters or plot, it sustains and enlightens. Laconic descriptions of fantastic cities woven together in a tapestry of voluminous nuance. Topics of memory, perception, vision, time, loss, longing, desire, death, signs, symbols and ultimately meaning are all carefully chosen and arrayed. Upon finishing this book, one has the feeling of have eaten a delicious meal too quickly. That upon reflection, it should have been savoured slowly.

Cities of dreams, cities of desire, subtle cities ... this book is an ode to all the possible cities one can dream, their most uncanny features described whit the unemotional precision of a chronicler, as is Marco Polo in this book describing them to Kubla Khan (maybe in the "sunny pleasure dome whit caves of ice") A surrealist work of art, lacking only the flying cities of Storm Constantine's "Calenture" which Italo Calvino would have liked.

A beautiful book about the ways in which the spaces around and within us define who we are and vice versa. The style and structure are singular and seem to radiate a sort of mystical quality which I don't think I can quantify. In fact, I don't think I'm smart enough to articulate why exactly this book can be so profound. But it is. I'd recommend it to anyone.

It's Calvino Man... Just great... for ten bucks... c'mon. Let yourself go and spiral into his world... i have remembered bits and pieces of these stories since I first read this 10 years ago... it has been a part of my visual language since... Do it! Buy it!

This book is clearly not to everyone's taste: friends of mine have been either enchanted or completely baffled by it. It is poetry masquerading as prose.
I don't relate to the cities as being places, but more as states of mind, or maybe metaphysical states. This is perhaps why the cities seem so magical.
If your're even slightly intrigued, give it a look. If you aren't going to like it, you'll know in about one minute.

This book is a masterpiece for me. It accompanied me throughout a long journey that I took in Europe in the past. It is written in a poetic way that makes you think, reflect and enter into the fantastic world of the invisible cities of Kublai Khan's empire, created by Calvino. Marco Polo works for the Khan. He has to visit many towns of the Mongolian empire so that later he can share his impressions with the great Khan. This is mainly because the empire is so big that Kublai Khan would never be able to visit all towns of his empire.

Each chapter has the name of a town, which is described by Marco Polo. In addition, there are many dialogs between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo that are, in my point of view, the most exciting part of the book. The dialogs are so intelligent and stimulating that I read some of them many times. They can trigger our natural curiosity about the way we see things around us, the future, the past, the present, etc. It is a book to be read in a slow pace so we can reflect upon each part. It helped me to slow down my frequently rushed rhythm of life. How conscious are we while we write the pages of our lives?

I think people have missed the point and gotten drawn in by Calvino. Calvino's Invisible Cities is a book about relationships. You can switch out the word "city" with "woman" pretty much ANYWHERE in the book and it discusses expectations vs understanding of women, and also how they tend to be mystified/objectified/*fied/built up in an imagination. And his discussions between Kubla and Marco are his rational self speaking to his dreamer/explorer self. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. Try it out. Right down to the descriptions. These cities are all women and how they confound, entice, or disgust him, and what he has taken away from each in the search for the perfect city/woman.

I find Italo Calvino to read like Dino Buzzati, Jorge Luis Borges and Stanislaw Lem ("Cyberiad" and "Mortal Engines"). Lush, odd, fantastic images. Not a novel or a collection of short stories in the usual sense, but a set of related vignettes about very unusual cities. Are they the same city? An opium dream of a book; highly recommended.

_Invisible Cities_ is presented as a dialogue between explorer Marco Polo and the great Kublai Khan, in which the former is allegedly describing cities he has visited in the Khan's empire. In his story telling, Marco Polo characterizes these cities in every which way possible: by their inner structures, their denizens, from above, below, within, through their mirror images, and even utilizing modern day urban settings. We come to realize, through Kublai Khan's eyes, that Marco Polo is not speaking at all of various cities in Khan's Tartar empire, but of Marco Polo's native Venice.

I refer to _Invisible Cities_ as "Calvino's Mantra" because Mr. Calvino continually repeats, almost like a mantra, the birth, death, and rebirth of a city throughout history. Calvino's images of his city are death-ridden: deterioration, vermin, rot, and a sense of a perpetual pessimism as the old city is dying just as a new city is beginning to germinate. This is echoed throughout the book ad infinitum.

Italo Calvino's book is a puzzler, much as the circumstances seem to Kublai Khan, who is forced to face the facts of his crumbling empire during Marco Polo's talk. It took me at least half the book to figure out the point of Calvino's cleverly written and imaginative, if greatly frustrating novel. I cannot say that I am entirely satisfied with the results. For all its fancifulness, _Invisible Cities_ is not a particularly fun read.

Calvino ranks up there with Boccaccio, Dante, and Eco as one of Italy's finest literary exports. Read this book and any other written by the man I wish to name my first child (boy or girl) after. You will not regret it, for even if one were not to enjoy his work one must at the very least admire it, and if not, well stick to Anne Rice you philistines.

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.

I have only discovered Calvino recently, due to a lack of classical education (I went engineering, instead, and thereby missed out on some good required reading in college). I have always been a reader, though, and when a few people I trusted said I needed to read Italo Calvino I started with If on a Winter's Night A Traveler. I was hooked.

Invisible Cities is my second helping of Calvino, and I am delighted. Calvino's words take you to each of the cities he describes, and each city will whet the appetite for the next.

This is a book to be savored. I think it is best consumed in 2-3 page bites over the course of a couple of weeks, so that you can let the flavor of each city sink in.

This collection of interconnected remembrances- most of which are only a page long is quite amazing. It is like remembering what your ancestors' cities looked like. Moreover, it is like remembering your ancestors' dreams and your own from childhood. If only the world was theis way. I cannot say enough good things about this novel. Get up and buy it today.

As I was reading the book, somehow I found myself searching for the crystals; their shapes and the infinite slope of the crystal..After reading the overview of Calvino in the end of the book about the formation of a crystal with each city being a different face of the crystal, everything was in its place in my mind..with all the thoughts and feelings bursting out in your mind, scattered all over the place; as if you could in no way get hold of anything, but still the very funny thing you come up in the very end becomes "the crystal" and how in fact everything had been so clear right from the beginning..Flowing through the clouds in a dream with divine pleasure.

i've read a few of calvino's other works, but always come back to this one as a favorite. these lovely little stories work on many levels, all of them filled with wonder, pleasure and a certain dark playfullness.

The imagery, as typical with Calvino, is vivid, otherworldly, and compelling. The book feels like a series of ideas, each sharply and succinctly illustrated.

He only problem is that the chapters feel like they could have appeared in any order, and that there was no underlying story arc. This made the end of the book feel extremely sudden and unexpected. Small flaw.

if they were told by scherazade....the story is trippy...history mixed in with some sci-fi...nice thing about the book is you don't have to be a sci-fi or history buff to really appreciate it, because the story is so good. also try " if on a winter's night a traveller..."

This book, if any, merits more than a single, swift reading. It is a rare gem which should be savored gradually. Each section a slight glimpse of the sublime, Invisible Cities, if you allow it, may prove a valuable lifelong companion.

This is the book I give all my friends who love the experience of travel. It is easy to read on subway, between meals on a long flight, and when you simply want a quick story to carry you to the next station. Also, a good book for the reader who thinks they are not a true book reader. I suggest it highly to parents to give their children when heading on a summer trip. Very thoughtful ideas.

Sublime beyond description.
I have loved this book for years. Like so many others, I stumbled into the arms of Calvino through "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller", a book at once beautiful, clever and maddening. And what an intriguing embrace it was. But this - this is truly extraordinary and any attempt to describe it would be utterly futile. I must have read it a dozen times or more, and yet every time I pick it up, it still gives me goosebumps.
Read it now.

I have never read a book like Invisible Cities. Each story is 1 - 3 pages in length and describes a different city. However, the descriptions are not so much the physicial characteristics of the cities, but the way the traveler feels upon entering or passing through each city. The book is more like poetry than a usual novel.
Calvino's imagination is wonderful. I wish I knew Italian so that I could read this work in its original language.

5 stars for brilliance, 3 stars for enjoyment.

The expectation that had been set for me when I added this to my reading list? "This is the book where the city is the story." That said, I was expecting more narrative than what I found here. (Call me a traditionalist but I expect a bit of characterization and plot.) As a "book", I didn't much care for Invisible Cities -- but I would add it to my bookshelf as a good lesson in how to write about places. There is some pretty potent imagery and interesting wordplay at work in here.

I have never read anything quite so beautiful and enchaunting. Calvino is a very talanted writter, his cities are something Salvador Dali would paint. I was also happy to notice that his writting is based on pure philosophy of logic, and it's free of any religeous or conservative ties.

This book is such a nice, small size, and it feels great! The cover isn't terribly interesting, but it's enough to intrigue the person next to you on the train and make you look reasonably intelligent.

Also, the sections in the text are often small enough to read one or two during a reasonable commute. Since it is so small, you might even be able to fit it in your pocket. Quite convenient.

I do have a few small gripes about the book, however. The paper seems rather cheap as it is very thin. The typeface is a little too thick, also, the combination of which sometimes makes it difficult to read.

Generally I like my books fast and plot-driven, with minimal description and at least quasi-linear plots lines. While Invisible Cities is none of those things, I would rate it among my favorite books. The prose is incredible, rich, almost erotic. At times I felt my heart beating faster as I read it. This is a book to linger inside of, to re-read often, to keep by your bedside to read snatches of before you go to sleep.

The book explores many different view points of a city. The author builds the city from scratch as he describes the city, but then leaves the city standing or demolished at the end. His use of two characters who comtemplate the tales of the cities is very unique. The conversations that the characters are engaged in are very profound and can be related to the reader. It seems as though the reader is invited into the conversations of the two characters.

Having read this book in both Italian and in English (and not being disappointed by the English translation) I have to say is that Italo Calvino is a truly masterful analytic writer. His gift of imagination works like a labryinth - intriguing , thought provoking and mysterious. "Invisible Cities" is a wonderful book.

I didn't like it much, and never finished it. The writing style is pleasant, but without "real" characters or a plot, this book is hardly worth your time. Perhaps if you left it in the bathroom? Then all of those vacant little tableaux would be of just the right length...

The writing is pure seduction, whimsical, enchanting, all those words which mean totally freaking dreamy. The problem is, for me at least, that it's the sort of book that I can't read straight through. It might take me a few weeks or a year. Probably because there isn't a plot to speak of. Anyway, expect poetry, get poetry. And don't let go of your copy because it'll never come back. Mine didn't.

This is one of the greatest books I have ever read.

I'm really upset that the only version available at the moment is so badly printed. The body text has been typeset in bold italic, and the printing is so bad that some of the letters have bits missing.

Wait until the publisher decides to print this masterpiece properly, then rush out and buy it.

Readers and fans of Calvino's Invisible Cities may be interested to know that an entire hotel has been hand-crafted on the theme of the book. It is located on the Balearic Island of Menorca, in Spain. Each room is based on a different 'invisible city'. I've seen it, it's amazing, no, it's overwhelming, astonishing. Pictures are at: [...]

Great book, the kind you can read many times and still come up with something new. Worth not just reading but spending time thinking about.

The only reason it's not five stars is that I felt it limited women (who tended to be somehow half-sequestered in windows and verandas and what not) to a single role while men seemed to be the explorers, the out-and-about-ers.

Others have noted the resemblance between Lightman's book "Einstein's Dreams" and this, one of Calvino's less brilliant Theme and Variations. The frame story, in which Marco Polo tells a frustrated Kublai Khan (who realizes he will never truly know the extent of his empire) about cities, real and imagined, that he has visited, is vaguely reminiscent of the 1001 Arabian Nights. Like Scherezade, Marco Polo panders to the Khan, and staves off his ill-humor through stories.

The cities themselves are named after women. Like the majority of Calvino's female characters, they suffer from an over-romanticized flatness that in this case falls short of his usual charm. The cities are mental constructs; they are hypotheticals, along the lines of Borges' "Library of Babel" or even "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." But unlike Borges, who commits to the construct for the space of a story, Calvino just weaves the world and moves on, not bothering to consider the consequences of the rules he's set up. I find it unsatisfying, but this is what some people love about it.

Pretty light fare. Repetitive. Doesn't quite hit its mark.

This book is so beautiful. Italo Calvino really draws you in to a world of invisible cities. As ever, his prose is truly masterful. I found myself rereading pages over and over because I did not want them to end. I am continuously buying new copies because I keep giving them away.

I've gotten only these fantastic reviews, but I had to read it (in the portuguese translation) for architecture school, and I just "didn't get it". It's easy to read, doesn't take much time, but there's no plot, the book is boring, I really DON'T GET why all the praise. So I agree with the one-star reviews: a stupid phantasy... Admittedly, I didn't read it all, I just stopped midway, gave a look at the end pages - it doesn't get any better, so I guess I missed nothing... pure waste of my time.

He's describing women he's known, in a kind of code, describing them intimately without giving away details. Why cities? Because when you fall in love, you are immersed in a whole new geography of mind and heart and place. Khan is the part of him that just tallies his conquests, Marco is the part of him that encounters them as real individuals. Ultimately they both admit they're not real, which means that the "cities" are the only reality.

"Rebuses may convey direct meanings, especially to inform or instruct illiterate people; or they may deliberately conceal meanings, to inform only the initiated or to puzzle and amuse." Encyclopedia Britannica, 2008. The book is a joke played upon readers who think it a serious work of fiction. Or, it is a puzzle amazing to deeply thoughtful readers seeking ancient wisdom in modern literature.

It is as beautiful as a finely stylized Rococo painting; and as meaningful or meaningless. Still, I'd rather enjoy the natural beauty of trees.
Pilgrimage: Sturgis to Wounded Knee and Back Home Again, a Memoir

I read this book because Calvino is the famed fabulist about which people I know tend to talk; the reviews published on him are almost universally positive. So imagine my surprise when I began reading this book which proved to be ethereal and wishy-washy in content, language and theme! I compare "Invisible Cities" to a sickly anemic child that has stopped running around and playing outside in the fresh air. It is short--that is it's only real success. If you are looking for plot, character development, and resolution in your reading material, then this book is not for you!

i had to read this for school, i hated it. its boring and repetitive. you can read the first 2 or 3 chapters and thats all you need, because it doesnt change. its just the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over again and again.. but i guess some people like that sort of thing.

I nust say i was really disappointed with this book. I startd reading it and quickly i realized that it might be a book for thinking about our vision over the cities, but however i quickly disliked it even as a novel.

The structure is fuzzy, there are imaginative descriptions of the cities grouped in the chapters which in my understanding don't have still any type of connection between them and additionally, the descriptions are extremely short. At the end i found myself with the feeling of reading the short description of multiple cities that somebody has imagined but with the feeling of not getting anything out of the book (not even in the phylosophical level).

I do not recomend this book. There are other books where there is a better structure and a conversation with the reader.

Gore Vidal loved the book and so do almost all the other reviewers here. What a bore (hmm, the towns all have female names, significant?). I also just read "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler..." More engaging but.... A clever but, for me, an insubstantial author. I hesitate to read his "The Baron In The Trees".

You lovers of his work: Can you actually recall more than three descriptions of the cities? And are the descriptions anything like what you'd apply to cities you've known? (Yes I know its fantasy but they have no ring of truth to them.)