Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
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Book Summary Information
Author: Italo CalvinoEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1978-05-03
ISBN: 0156453800
Number of pages: 165
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780156453806
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Invisible Cities
Book Review: 55 cities--or 55 ways at looking at one
Summary: 3 Stars
Perhaps one of the oddest things about the reception of "Invisible Cities" is that it was a finalist for a Nebula Award. Although mathematics and architecture figure prominently, the book really isn't science fiction, and while it is certainly fanciful, it's a stretch to call this meditation a fantasy novel. Instead, Marco Polo's descriptions of 55 imaginary cities are clever, whimsical prose poems, mixing brainy puns and shrewd aphorisms. Calvino constructs cities the way Poe assembles dreams; "Invisible Cities" is the full-length work Borges never wrote.
The comparison to Borges is instructive, because what works in the short form begins to show signs of strain in this novella. Calvino sprinkles bons mots and truisms liberally amongst the tightly structured chapters (whose interwoven, enumerated headings might build, some readers argue, a sine wave or a skyline or something meaningful). Reading the book is to waver back and forth between admiring the clever wordplay and recognizing its cynical candor: "The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea." "There is no language without deceit." A city made entirely of pipes; a city divided for the dead, the living, the unborn; a city whose trash expands outward, trapping its citizens within; a city that looks just like the city you just left; a city that exists only in old postcards depicting a different city that never really existed--you'll recognize aspects of every city in each of these cities, or (more precisely) you'll recognize Venice.
Quite frankly, this isn't my thing; although parts made me laugh and parts made me think, I found "Invisible Cities" as repetitive and cute as it is innovative and profound, its substance a slave to its structure, its philosophy more dimestore than rigorous. (The metafiction of "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" and the allegory of "The Baron in the Trees" are more to my liking.) But this book will certainly gratify readers who long for fiction that aspires to Emersonian grandeur or who would prefer something more expansive than the bite-sized sketches offered by Borges.
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