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    Las ciudades invisibles
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    Las ciudades invisibles
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    Las ciudades invisibles
    Ebook147 pages2 hours

    Las ciudades invisibles

    By Italo Calvino

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Las ciudades invisibles se presentan como una serie de relatos de viaje que Marco Polo hace a Kublai Kan, emperador de los tártaros... A este emperador melancólico que ha comprendido que su ilimitado poder poco cuenta en un mundo que marcha hacia la ruina, un viajero imaginario le habla de ciudades imposibles, por ejemplo una ciudad microscópica que va ensanchándose y termina formada por muchas ciudades concéntricas en expansión, una ciudad telaraña suspendida sobre un abismo, o una ciudad bidimensional como Moriana... Creo que lo que el libro evoca no es solo una idea atemporal de la ciudad, sino que desarrolla, de manera unas veces implícita y otras explícita, una discusión sobre la ciudad moderna... Creo haber escrito algo como un último poema de amor a las ciudades, cuando es cada vez más difícil vivirlas como ciudades. Italo Calvino
    LanguageEspañol
    PublisherSiruela
    Release dateOct 16, 2012
    ISBN9788415723196
    Unavailable
    Las ciudades invisibles
    Author

    Italo Calvino

    Italo Calvino (1923–1985) was born in Cuba and grew up in San Remo, Italy. He began as an essayist and a journalist but is best known for his fiction, including Invisible Cities, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Marcovaldo, and Mr. Palomar.

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    Reviews for Las ciudades invisibles

    4/5

    1,897 ratings80 reviews

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    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 3/5
      Absoluut geen gewoon boek, eerder een bundeling poëtisch proza, en daar moet je natuurlijk een beetje gevoelig voor zijn. Rode draad zijn de korte schetsen van allerlei exotische steden, portretjes die de Venetiaanse reiziger Marco Polo vertelt aan de Tataarse keizer Kublai Khan. Het doet allemaal erg vreemd aan, soms in de sfeer van 1001 nachten, soms zoals de labyrinthen van Jorge Borges. Af en toe word je erg geraakt door een beeld, een inzicht, een verwoording, maar het blijft allemaal nogal cerebraal.
    • 5/5
      Just beautiful.
    • 4/5
      Beautiful prose - a collection of impressions of the self in space. Very instructive.
    • 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.
    • 4/5
      A series of interconnected prose poems, ostensibly about imaginary cities. Often fascinating. Sometimes beautiful. Sometimes pretentious. Definitely worth reading.
    • 5/5
      I've read the portuguese translation of this book.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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).
    • 3/5
      Impressive, though not entirely enjoyable. I can recognize its brilliance without really having liked it that much. If you like poetry, you will appreciate this book more than I did. Each city description is flowery and organic both in its formation and the image it evokes in your mind. Unfortunately, my taste is not sophisticated enough; I´ve never been able to fully enjoy poetry, and the same goes with this book. It seemed pointless to me a lot of the time. After reading this, Baron in the Trees, and If on a Winter´s Night a Traveler, I still enjoyed the last one the best.

      The book picked up pace and attracted me more in the later chapters, especially 5-7, when the narrative was a little more coherent. The concluding conversation was poignant as well. Any way you look at it, Calvino is a master wordsmith. Trying to imagine how he comes up with such scenarios and descriptions is mind-boggling.

      It definitely merits another reading, perhaps in the order of each type of city. Normally, I put the three-star books in the "To be exchanged" pile, but this is one of the rare ones that has piqued my interest enough to keep around.

    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 5/5
      My new favorite book.
    • 1/5
      I must be missing something, since everyone seems to love this book, but I just didn't get it. The chapters are fragmentary descriptions of fantastical cities. There is no plot or story at all. Just like word paintings, maybe. Except poems are much better ways to paint a word picture. This is a short book, but I have to admit that it is one of the few I gave up on and quit reading before I finished.
    • 5/5
      One of my favorite books. The description of the cities are poetry; the conversations between Marco Polo and Kubla Khan are mediations on memory, language, and the limits of communication. Every time I return to this slim book, it seems to include cities I've never seen before. And then there's the mystery of the chapter titles... does their order imply a special message of its own?
    • 3/5
      Picasso and Escher, as written by Bourges? I'm not completely sure what to make of this but amidst the wanderings were some profound tidbits. The story is framed as a dialogue between the Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, discussing the nature of the cities he's seen, which are all dimensions of Venice. My favorites: Valdrada (the city is reflected in every detail by the water in borders), Leandra (are the two species political or religious parties, or men and women?), Leonia (where people throw everything out and start with new stuff every day), and Trude ("The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.").
    • 4/5
      This book is quite short, and didn't take me long to read. Some people will probably think that its insubstantial, but it benefits from reading slowly, and taking time to think about what the passages mean. Some parts made me think, but I suspect that you could read it at several levels. I probably missed some of the meaning, but even if you just understand what is written superficially you will probably enjoy it. I will probably get more out of it upon successive readings.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      This book is a metaphysical journey in the form of a conversation between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo discussing the various attributes and perspectives of human civilizations with imagined cities as their flagships.

      It reaffirmed my view that most original and handsome literature in English has came from continental Europe( Russia inclusive) and from languages other than English.

      Frankly I am yet to come across a prose more compact and more charming than what I have read here. This is not just good read but must-have repeated read.
    • 4/5
      I can't say I 'got' this, taken as a whole, but I enjoyed each part. What I mean is it was more like poetry than prose, so I would like to come back to it several times ... and to read it in Italian too.Favourite line this time:Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
    • 5/5
      Love this book. One of the most intelligent books ever imagined and one of the few books by another I truly wish I would have written.
    • 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.
    • 5/5
      A gem of immaginative genius. Evocative recollections of fanciful and fantastic cities distilled into short, strikingly descriptive and dream-like 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.
    • 4/5
      Fantastic sojourn by the Marco Polo of the imagination, wherein he desperately scribbles his impressions of fabulous cities before they fade into fog.
    • 5/5
      One of the most inventive collections of short fiction ever written.
    • 4/5
      Invisible Cities is the second Calvino book that I have read (the other being If on a winter's night a traveler). Like it, Invisible Cities has an unusual form; in this case a series of very brief fables each describing a fantastic, imaginary city. I would put this book more in the interesting, thought provoking category than entertaining (whereas traveler managed to do both). The fables are set within a framing story which consists of a series of dialogues between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo; some of the intervening fables are set in modern times (mentioning things like motorcycles, airports, munitions factories, and radios). Invisible Cities is rife with symbolism. One of the most striking fables is about a city that strives to copy an imagined perfection in the skies above, but only achieves order in its sewage system. Many of the fables explore the difference between perception and reality. At times they offer a glimpse of the fantastic in our everyday lives.
    • 4/5
      A book about two men. Kublai Kahn, who lives inside his palace, never leaving the safety of the walls but desperately wants to know what the outside world is like and Marco Polo who lives by exploring the wonders of the world and tries to describe it to Kublai. Although the names are of men who once lived, the characters in the book are entirely fictional. The book is very thought provoking and was likely ahead of it's time when it was published. The book touches issues that are relevant even today, like overpopulation and excessive consumption of commodities.Although the book consists of short stories it is quite difficult to read. Italo Calvino uses very long sentences and following the intricate descriptions of the cities requires a lot of concentration. Not a book for easy reading while commuting. My perception about this book would probably improve on second reading, but I don't think I will have the patience for it.