Product Description

In "Invisible Cities" Marco Polo conjures up cities of magical times for his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, but gradually it becomes clear that he is actually describing one city: Venice. As Gore Vidal wrote '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'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3349 in Books
• Published on: 1997-10-02
• Original language: Italian
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Review
'The most beautiful of his books throws up ideas, allusions, and breathtaking imaginative insights on almost every page. Each time he returns from his travels, Marco Polo is invited by Kublai Khan to describe the cities he has visited...Although he makes Marco Polo summon up many cities for the Khan's imagination to feed on, Calvino is describing only one city in this book. Venice, that decaying heap of incomparable splendour, still stands as substantial evidence of man's ability to create something perfect out of chaos' Paul Bailey Times Literary Supplement

Observer
‘Whole chapters of unforced poetic prose in which insight and fantasy are perfectly matched…an exquisite world’

New York Review of Books
‘Invisible Cities’ is perhaps his most beautiful work…the artist seems to have made peace with the tension between man’s ideas of the many and the one’

Customer Reviews

A masterpiece
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?

A masterpiece
A book that describes every imaginery city, every city that you have ever visited, every city that you have ever wanted to visit or imagine, or the city you have come from which you wish to be as you imagined it to be...this is a book about the language of the imagination, a book of cities as pychological states, physical states, sensory states...A book about descriptions ? Yes. But descriptions that have a transcendant quality. Not much narrative ? True, but yet they contain fragments of narrative that have an extraordinary quality, about place, and what place means to us all. Calvino was a truely great novelist, one of the great European novelists of this century, on par with Beckett..yet less bleak, no less universal. This is one, if not the best, of his "books". If you like this also try "If on an invisible night" and "Mr Paloma".

If you like to combine "thought-provoking" with sensual - a very unusual and wonderful combination.

Truly Sublime
Before reading this novel, you must note one thing - there is no plot whatsoever. Despite what the blurb says about Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, that is simply a framework, a structure to hold a series of highly impressionistic descriptions of cities together. The book covers a remarkable range of ideas - death, life, religion and relationships to name but four. However, the lack of plot does not make it any less worthwhile nor any less literary - the prose is lush and poetic, lucid and evocative, and it would be hard not to be captivated by Calvino's remarkable style. Inventive, enlessly imaginative, extremely experimental, Calvino created a beautiful and memorable book - in effect, Calvino wrote the plotless novel.