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3.5
[Invisible Cities] [By: ITALO CALVINO] [January, 1997]
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"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 to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his." So begins Italo Calvino's compilation of fragmentary urban images. As Marco tells the khan about Armilla, which "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," the spider-web city of Octavia, and other marvelous burgs, it may be that he is creating them all out of his imagination, or perhaps he is recreating details of his native Venice over and over again, or perhaps he is simply recounting some of the myriad possible forms a city might take.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities[Invisible Cities] [By: ITALO CALVINO] [January, 1997] Reviews
3.5
“Each city is a page or two long and reads like a prose poem about memory, desire, death, language, or the impossibility of knowing a place by describing it. There’s no plot. You don’t need one. You just keep reading because every city reshapes the way you see the one before it. It’s the kind of book you can open to any page and fall into, and the kind of book that changes depending on what you’re carrying when you read it. I’ve gone through it twice and I’ll go through it again.”
“Invisible Cities feels like wandering through places found in Ghibli films such as Tales from Earthsea, with its worlds shaped by balance; Castle in the Sky, where ruins are marked by abandonment; and Arrietty, with its quiet lives at the margins.”
““The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” — Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
In our voyage through life, we often discover that our pursuits reflect our innermost desires. Regardless of the paths we choose or the places we visit, it becomes clear that the quest often leads us back to our true selves. We find what we seek. And often, what we seek are ourselves.
Will I ever find the right words to craft a review of one of Calvino’s books that truly captures its brilliance? I think not.”
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