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Invisible Cities

by Italo Calvino
Invisible Cities

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  • Synopses & Reviews

ISBN13: 9780156453806
ISBN10: 0156453800
Condition: Standard


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25 Books to Read Before You Die: World Edition

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Staff Pick

Invisible Cities is the most generous book I've ever read, feeding me something vital each time I pick it up, as each new context imbues it with fresh meaning. Straddling the blurry lines between reality and fiction, Italo Calvino gives us a phenomenology of cities, and by extension, a deep examination of everything human. The little myths that compose Invisible Cities offer meditations on all of the things that matter most: love, aging, waste, the future, memory, and more. But most of all, Calvino suggests that we be wary of our totalizing impulse to conquer knowledge or anything else we may love. If we're not careful, we may destroy the very thing we set out to find. Recommended By Cosima C., Powells.com

Invisible Cities is an exquisite book, fantastical and glittering and strange. Marco Polo and Kublai Khan sit together in a garden in the evening, and Marco Polo regales Khan with tales of cities he has encountered — cities of trade, of water, of sand, and also cities of the dead, of the mad, of dreams. Calvino's brilliant, quicksilver mind is on full display here, mapping the desires and fears of our human condition onto an ever-shifting landscape. Recommended By Jill O., Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else." — from Invisible Cities

In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo — Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.

Review

"Invisible Cities changed the way we read and what is possible in the balance between poetry and prose . . . The book I would choose as pillow and plate, alone on a desert island." Jeanette Winterson

Review

"Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant." Gore Vidal, The New York Review of Books

Synopsis

"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else." -- from Invisible Cities

In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo -- Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.

"Invisible Cities changed the way we read and what is possible in the balance between poetry and prose . . . The book I would choose as pillow and plate, alone on a desert island." -- Jeanette Winterson

Synopsis

Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels -- a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory.

"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else." In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo -- Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.

About the Author

ITALO CALVINO’s superb storytelling gifts earned him international renown and a reputation as "one of the world's best fabulists" (New York Times Book Review). He is the author of numerous works of fiction, as well as essays, criticism, and literary anthologies. Born in Cuba in 1923, Calvino was raised in Italy, where he lived most of his life. At the time of his death, in Siena in 1985, he was the most translated contemporary Italian writer.

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Average customer rating 4.6 (5 comments)

`
lukas , March 08, 2014 (view all comments by lukas)
"Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know." So, like, Kublai Khan and Marco Polo are just kicking it in a garden and M-Pol starts telling the Khan stories of these fantastic cities, which maybe are all the same city? More like "Awesome Cities," amiright? The great Italian fabulist's novel is a paean to storytelling and imagination in the tradition of the Arabian Nights, Chaucer and Calvino's countryman Boccaccio. I still think "If On A Winter's Night" his best work. You may also like Salman Rushdie and Umberto Eco.

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GDuperreault , August 04, 2013 (view all comments by GDuperreault)
This book is impossible to review. It isn't prose, it isn't poetry, it isn't history, it isn't a novel, it isn't a narrative. I festooned this small book with yellow sticky notes of the interesting bits, of the beautiful bits, of the energizing bits. It is imagination. This is imagination on a multiplicity of levels and layers. Imagine, if you can, Marco Polo and Genghis Khan talking about Polo's travel experiences. Then imagine Polo describing the wonders of the things he's seen. Then imagine that Polo has imagined more cities than he's seen, filled them with magical constructs, and eccentric citizenry, architecture, social mores. It is, perhaps, most like a travel journal, or log, but like none you could have imagined. Polo, or perhaps Khan's biographers, have catalogued these "invisible cities" as belonging to distinct classifications. Memory Desire Signs Thin . . . and several more. Then comes a short description of the city that purports to provide the rationale for the city having been classified as it was. These descriptions are collected into sets, separated by the narrator's observation of the meeting and conversations between Khan and Polo. The writing is brilliant. Calvino's imagination appears to be unbounded and endless. From one of the festooning stickies, picked randomly: ". . . But with all this, I would not be telling you the city's true essence; for while the description of Anastasia awakens desires one at a time only to force you to stifle them, when you are in the heart of Anastasia one morning your desires waken all at once and surround you. The city appears to you as a whole where no desire is lost and all of which you are a part, and since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing but inhabit this desire and be content. Such is the power, sometimes called malignant, sometimes benign, that Anastasia, the treacherous city, possesses; if for eight hours a day you work as a cutter of agate, onyx, chrysoprase, your labour which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave" (from Cities and Desire 2). And from one the Khan/Polo ruminations: ". . . As time went by, words began to replace objects and gestures in Marco's tales: first exclamations, isolated nouns, dry verbs, then phrases, rarified and leafy discourses, metaphors and tropes. The foreigner had learned to speak the emperor's language or the emperor to understand the language of the foreigner. But you would have said communication between them was less happy than in the past: to be sure, words were more useful than objects and gestures in listing the most important things of every province and city -- monuments, markets, costumes, fauna and flora -- and yet when Polo began to talk about how life must be in those places, day after day, evening after evening, words failed him, and little by little, he went back to relying on gestures, grimaces, glances" (from after Trading Cities 1). This is a startling and amazing read.

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Bronte , September 02, 2011 (view all comments by Bronte)
A timeless novella in a series of prose poems, translated from the original Italian, in which explorer Marco Polo talks with Kublai Khan and described for him 55 imaginary cities he's seen on his travels. Each chapter in this slim book is a short, beautiful burst of language.

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frederarch , January 03, 2011
Every architect and planner should read this book.

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mcoulterfineart , January 16, 2010
This book is a true wonder.

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Product Details

ISBN:
9780156453806
Binding:
Trade Paperback
Publication date:
05/03/1978
Publisher:
CLARION & MARINER
Series info:
Harvest/HBJ Book
Pages:
176
Height:
.47IN
Width:
5.43IN
Thickness:
.50
Series:
Harvest/HBJ Book
Number of Units:
1
Copyright Year:
1978
Author:
Italo Calvino
Translator:
William Weaver
Translator:
William Weaver
Translator:
William Weaver
Subject:
Biographical fiction
Subject:
Fiction
Subject:
Polo, Marco
Subject:
Polo, Marco - Fiction
Subject:
General Fiction
Subject:
Literature-A to Z
Subject:
Explorers
Subject:
Explorers -- Italy -- Fiction.
Subject:
Kublai Khan

Ships free on qualified orders.
Add to Cart
$10.95
List Price:$15.99
Used Trade Paperback
Ships in 1 to 3 days
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QtyStore
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1Hawthorne

More copies of this ISBN

  • New, Trade Paperback, $15.99
  • Used, Trade Paperback, $7.95

This title in other editions

  • Used, Trade Paperback, $7.95
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