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Invisible Cities
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Invisible Cities
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Invisible Cities
Audiobook2 hours

Invisible Cities

Written by Italo Calvino

Narrated by John Lee

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo-Tartar emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts the emperor with tales 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. Soon it becomes clear that each of these fantastic places is really the same place.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherTantor Audio
Release dateJun 24, 2013
ISBN9781452684482
Author

Italo Calvino

ITALO CALVINO (1923–1985) attained worldwide renown as one of the twentieth century’s greatest storytellers. Born in Cuba, he was raised in San Remo, Italy, and later lived in Turin, Paris, Rome, and elsewhere. Among his many works are Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveler, The Baron in the Trees, and other novels, as well as numerous collections of fiction, folktales, criticism, and essays. His works have been translated into dozens of languages.

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Reviews for Invisible Cities

Rating: 4.1477216354112105 out of 5 stars
4/5

1,909 ratings82 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Whatever you are expecting, this is not it. Reading this series of fantasies is like stumbling upon a set of incantations--confusing, intriguing, and once you get going you sometimes think it might actually be working. So much in literature was made possible by the form, or form breakage, of Invisible Cities. I'd recommend it for anyone seeking to reassure themselves that anything is possible.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Far too clever for me. I failed to see the point or understand much of what was going on. Read the French translation which I doubt is the reason for my incomprehension; this is a poetic vision of cities presented as a dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. I don’t speak or read Italian but I may as well have read it in the original version as it would probably have made as much sense to me. Some nice turns of phrases and at times I felt transported for short bursts here and there when my brain wasn’t resisting and saying “this is all very nice but what the hell is going on here?!”I suppose I could give it five stars and say this book was a surreal and transporting experience to make myself look like a real intellectual, but I’m not trying to impress anyone. It was surreal, yes. But it was also a slog and nearly put me to sleep more than once.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Such a Calvino premise: Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan of the variety of cities within this book. All are fantastical, and beyond belief. All are named after women. All are, in a way, like every city on earth.

    There are lots of layers here, for such a short book. I loved the bizarre variety of city descriptions, but I also loved how Calvino connected these places back to some truth of the heart. So much is going on here with love of place and person, and the loss of both.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Marco Polo is in conversation with Kublai Khan, while interspersing chapters are short snipets about those imaginative cities that they are discussing. The conversations book end a few cities in each chapter and Kublai Khan subtly mentions something the cities might be about: like playing a game of chess, seeing the board from above, and then seeing the cities in that chapter from above. Calvino is extremely imaginative here, coming up with a new idea for a city every couple of pages. Each city could have been an entire book, but Calvino is precise with his words. His powers of imagination are amazing. To have a new city be perfectly described within a couple of pages so you can see it in your mind is quite a feat. The ideas are always stunning. I tried to write down my favorite pages, but it almost was the entire book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    For an aesthete and especially a synaesthete like me, this combination of, oh ... geometry and spice is as good as it gets. Wish I'd had this book when I was 15, when each page would've made me translucent or sent me tumbling into the distant past or fill my mouth with dirt or whatever (they still do, momentarily, like a flash, but strawberries of course don't taste as good anymore with age either, etc.), and when even the bevies of bathing beauties (and dancing girls, and milkmaids) would not have seemed excessive. It's a catalogue of wonders here.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Just beautiful.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    If you set out to write novel without any characters or plot, you might end up with something like Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities." It's fifty or so descriptions of imaginary cities tied together, more or less, by a frame tale describing the meeting between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. It's certainly imaginative and, in places, it's very beautiful: Calvino's writing is precise and his vocabulary seemingly boundless. It's easy to trace his obsessions: opposition, form and nothingness, signs and their meanings, the limits of language, the process of accretion and destruction, the long, slow cycles of history. Still, the lack of anything like a conventional plot makes it hard to really grab onto anything here. The author presents the reader with a series of beguiling concepts, enchanting images, and logical puzzles: "Invisible Cities" has sort of a "ViewMaster on acid" thing going on. But when it comes right down to it, the book is all setting: as with most post-everything lit, the whole enterprise often seems more clever than affecting. The most human element here seems to be the names of the cities themselves, as most of them seem to be named after women. Still, I'm not sure how much of the book I'll remember, what will stick with me and what won't, and, yes, I imagine that that's a proposition that Calvino himself might have enjoyed, or even intended. I can certainly see how this book might have had a profound influence on some modern fantasy authors, and I'm probably glad it exists, but I'm not sure that I enjoyed it. The book is, I'm sad to say, probably only readable because it's so short, and it might be one to savor at the pace of a chapter a day. I read in a rush for a book group, and that might have been a less-than-ideal situation. I'm glad that "Invisible Cities" exists, and it's likely that someone out there could make an argument that the book opened doors for the writers who followed Calvino. Next time, though, I'd actually like to see someone go through them.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A series of interconnected prose poems, ostensibly about imaginary cities. Often fascinating. Sometimes beautiful. Sometimes pretentious. Definitely worth reading.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'd highly recommend this book to anyone who likes to, or would like to write fiction. Calvino creates a lot of depth as he describes various cities in this book.

    At times things might feel a little monotonous, but if you try really hard to catch the underlying meaning behind each city, you will be greatly rewarded.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I can't give it the complete 5 stars because 3/4 through I accidentally left it at Neil's house. In Columbus. So it's likely they'll add it to their library and I'll never see it again.

    That said: to rip off the jacket review (sorry... Gore Vidal?) this is more of a meditation than a novel per se. The patterns and rhythms with which Calvino, through Marco Polo (commandeered as narrator), evokes city after city after city after city, all with women's names, is hypnotic. It would be an interesting art project to draw, paint, print, or otherwise represent the entirety of this urban catalogue in some medium other than prose (or poetry, if you are so inclined to call it so).
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I've read the portuguese translation of this book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Strange and fabulous, but it seemed a bit too conceptual for me to really say I loved it. I would describe it as a very special book.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I had trouble with Invisible Cities. It's beautiful, light, a dream of a soap bubble of a book, insubstantial and for me, really difficult. I can appreciate the writing, the dreamy nature of the book, but I can't love it. It just didn't quite work for me. Maybe written by Catherynne M. Valente it would have worked for me -- her use of language has weight, somehow -- but in this translation at least, no, Calvino didn't work very well for me. It's gorgeous, but I quickly got impatient with it.It's still a worthwhile read, I think, but don't look for a story here: that's not the kind of book this is. It's more like a dreamscape.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I found this book to be very interesting. I loved the descriptions of all the cites but they were too much to take in on one reading. This is a book that needs to be read slowly and often in order to devour all the information.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I think I read this at the wrong time in my life. I could appreciate the beautiful prose but only a few of the chapters spoke to me. Mostly I felt stupid as clearly there was some meaning that I was just not getting and didn't have the energy or interest to figure out.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I am not a fan of post modernism and all the genres around it. I had tried reading it through the years, trying to see what people see in these books and failing every single time. I don't have issues with the meta-parts of the style. Or with the stream of consciousnesses narratives. The metaphors and the required imagination does not bother me at all. It is the combination of all of them, the attempt to use the language in a new way that backfires way too often. I can recognize a good novel of the type but I still don't like them and rarely read them.Invisible cities is a post modern novel. Except that its author knows what he is doing and how to use language to hint and show. The description of the 55 cities is sparse and at the same time complete; it is a sketch done by a sketch artist who can convey more in a single stroke than another artist needs 2 feet of a picture to show. The framing story of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan has an almost Scheherazade's feeling to it - the stories of the cities do not seem connected to it or to each other but you can see how they derive from each other, complement and enrich them.And now and again you hear about a city that you know about - like Trude - the city that anyone that had done consulting work will recognize - you need to see the name printed to distinguish between the airports, highways, hotels... Some of the cities come fully fledged; some are just sketched. And somewhere along the way, the book transforms into a dialog about language and cities, philosophy and reality, listening and talking (and does the listener shape a story or does the one that tells the story) and so much more.I am not sure if I am going to read another book by Calvino - it still is not my style. But Invisible Cities is worth reading - mainly for making you think over something in a different way
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I'm not sure what to say about Invisible Cities. If you require a storyline, you shouldn't read it. But if you can be drawn in by vignettes about imaginary cities, alternating with (possibly also imaginary) conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, you will probably enjoy it. Polo has traveled throughout the Khan's kingdom and is ostensibly describing cities therein to him. However, they're all pretty wild-sounding cities: one city is symbolic, with every item in them representing something else; another was built in the form of a maze to trap a woman in a dream; yet another is built like a spiderweb over an abyss. The Khan questions Polo about the truth in his stories, and also why the only city he never seems to mention is the one he comes from, Venice.I was charmed by the cities, by their whimsicality but also their underlying truths. I am not a huge fan of philosophy, but I even enjoyed the conversational musings of Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. And as a bonus, this did more to enhance my understanding of Venice than any nonfiction book has so far.Recommended for: dreamers, architects and city planners, anyone who lives in a city.Quote: "Millions of eyes look up at windows, bridges, capers, and they might be scanning a blank page. Many are the cities like Phyllis, which elude the gaze of all, except the man who catches them by surprise."
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Another all-time favourite, in which Calvino imagines Marco Polo describing many cities of Italy all based on different aspects of the Venice of his memory. Poetic, imaginative and hauntingly memorable.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino tells of Marco Polo describing elegantly a vast number of cities to the Great Khan. Each city is described in a elegant prose poem that transports the reader to all manner of cities while after each chapter the Khan and Polo discuss various things relating to language, meaning and so on.

    On the level of its imagery alone, Invisible Cities is a pleasing book but it is more than that: it is an extended meditation on the meaning of city life and how man interacts with those around him. However, it also runs into periods where either Calvino is obfuscating deliberately or he is just being pretentious. Still, it is an enjoyable and thought-provoking book but perhaps not the best Calvino novel with which to start.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Oh, Invisible Cities, beloved of my youth. I have such a soft spot for this book, and it didn't disappoint: Memories of my college-aged self sitting in my friend's grubby East Village loft in a haze of pot smoke, passing the book around and taking turns reading chapters. It's still lovely, if not quite so revelatory as it was when I was 19, but as far as reading nostalgia goes it's unbeatable.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a hard book to rate. At its best, it is mesmerizing and unique. It creates an imaginative universe of imaginary cities like none you've ever pictured before. My favorite was a city that created a twin city of the dead underground, where they placed the skeletons in positions as if they were doing jobs, but then as the underground city started to slowly evolve the above-ground one mirrored it, until it became unclear which city was copying which and which was the primary one. Dozens and dozens of cities like these are depicted in prose poems generally of one to three pages.

    These descriptions of cities are framed by a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan about these cities, a dialogue that is highly abstract and yet also feels completely real, like something Calvino discovered rather than created.

    The downside of Invisible Cities is that, at least for me, it did not repay a reading from beginning to end, even one that I did relatively slowly over the course of a few weeks. I loved many individual parts, liked the impression of the whole, but never fully "understood" it as a unified work of fiction and often felt like flipping through some of the cities. So, at least for me, it is a book I plan to dip back into random chapters in the future rather than read from beginning to end.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Italo Calvino is a genius of a writer. I absolutely adore his writing. Even midway through the book, all I could think was wow, wow, I love this, wow.

    It's in the feel of the writing, it's in the ambiance he creates with his words. There is a sense of longing and mystery and just the feel of a person sitting down with a mug of something steaming in his hands, closing his eyes and letting the steam wash over his cheeks.

    Invisible Cities is such a beautiful book for the possibilities it evokes in the mind. These snipbits of cities are endless possibilities waiting to be unraveled. The conversations between the the Khan and Marco Polo are a hint of the past and the theme that ties the book together.

    I adore this book. I will have to come back to it.
    It is not an easy read. It is not a book to skim through and be done. Each little paragraph is an entire city, each little paragraph is a city of thought to be discovered.
    But it is beautiful.

    Five stars because I love it too much, and I only give five stars to books I love. Recommended only for people who love imagination.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Beautiful prose - a collection of impressions of the self in space. Very instructive.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I remember this was the first Italo Calvino book I grasped onto. I felt this sweeping sense of s city as a place with a story..almost in some senses its own entity...living breathing and just as human as the beings housed inside it. Calvino's creativity and sheer imagination come into place with all kinds of varied descriptions of cities...names unfamiliar but by the end of even the shorter passages, you feel you've been there. This makes great late night reading.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a hard book to rate. At its best, it is mesmerizing and unique. It creates an imaginative universe of imaginary cities like none you've ever pictured before. My favorite was a city that created a twin city of the dead underground, where they placed the skeletons in positions as if they were doing jobs, but then as the underground city started to slowly evolve the above-ground one mirrored it, until it became unclear which city was copying which and which was the primary one. Dozens and dozens of cities like these are depicted in prose poems generally of one to three pages.These descriptions of cities are framed by a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan about these cities, a dialogue that is highly abstract and yet also feels completely real, like something Calvino discovered rather than created.The downside of Invisible Cities is that, at least for me, it did not repay a reading from beginning to end, even one that I did relatively slowly over the course of a few weeks. I loved many individual parts, liked the impression of the whole, but never fully "understood" it as a unified work of fiction and often felt like flipping through some of the cities. So, at least for me, it is a book I plan to dip back into random chapters in the future rather than read from beginning to end.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a poetic journey through the endless kingdom of the Great Kublai Khan as each city is rendered conversationally by his ambassador Marco Polo. There are as many synapses in the human brain as there are Invisible Cities to Italo Calvino. The Khan has dreamt of a city for which he orders,"Set out, explore every coast, and seek this city" the Khan says to Marco. "Then come back and tell me if my dream corresponds to reality." "Forgive me, my lord, there is no doubt that sooner or later I shall set sail from that dock," Marco Says, "but I shall not come back to tell you of it. The city exists and it has a simple secret: it knows only departures, not returns."
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    My new favorite book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Plenty of other much better reviews but I just wanted to leave a few comments. I loved this. Calvino has a way of nailing down the feelings that places engender in us through descriptions of any number of things – the buildings, a ritual, entrance. I’m going to go back and reread in a different order and will have more comments then.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Ostensibly, this consists of a series of conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in which Polo describes to the Khan the cities he's encountered in his travels. But the descriptions are all abstract, dreamlike, metaphorical, and strange. There are cities that are not the same city when you arrive as when you leave, cities with mirror images that exist above or below or inside themselves, cities whose histories are endlessly cyclical, cities that are built entirely of symbols, or memories or desires. These descriptions aren't about cities as concrete objects so much as they are about the idea of cities, about human perceptions, about... Well, it's hard to always know exactly what they're about. Often the meaning is obscure, which can be slightly frustrating, but is also rather wonderful: this feels very much like the kind of book you can come back to over and over and always find some new insight in it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I found myself rushing through the rest of this towards the end. Some very pretty language, but it got a little tiresome after a while. I'm sure that this is a work of genius and all, he is widely regarded as one, but he lost me a bit. Sad. I'll have to try another.