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Theories.One could easily declare that the protagonists of this book are the cities, which are different versions of the same city that doesn’t really exist, only maybe in the writer’s mind. Either Venice or Paris, Calvino’s cities are a trip through imagination to lives never had, doors never opened, people never met.Someone else might appoint the reader as the real protagonist of Calvino’s book for he becomes the traveler who visits these cities mentally, which are nothing else than representa...
A city inhabiting one’s inside, its streets, lanes and by-lanes running in the veins and arteries, the hubbub of the city enlivening even the tiniest fraction of a being. The city; living, breathing, growing and leaving an impression in the very essence, even if it is never visited in one’s lifetime. And then - a multitude of such cities, standing under the auspices of their heritage, a witness to the chronicles of their golden times, cities with their halos; an invisible but inescapable allure....
“I LIKE NONSENSE. IT WAKES UP THE BRAIN CELLS.”Dr. SeussStuff and nonsense! The old folks used to say - and our fantastic inner fantasies can take us there for sure. But watch out.For traumatic thoughts may occur:When to sweet sessions of silent thought(We) summon up Remembrance of Things Past...So said the Bard, suggesting posthumously to Scott Moncrieff a snappy title for his new English translation of La Recherche du Temps Perdu, with all its devastating aperçus!For to some people the past is...
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Kubla KhanThere are a countless number of cities but the most mysterious are those that we build in our imagination. Marco Polo arrives and he tells Kublai Khan about ghostly cities he visited during his journeys… Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could no...
Heidi Whitman - Brain Terrain. I have not read Marco Polos’s Journeys, but I could imagine what he has written. Had I read it, I also would have had to imagine what he had written. Same verbs, different tenses.As I am sitting on a bench in front of a museum, waiting for a friend, a family of Italian tourists comes and sits next to me. They come from the land of Marco Polo, or maybe not, may be from the land of Italo Calvino since I do not know if they are Venetians. Italy was a projection of
It's easy to describe what 'Invisible Cities' is not rather than what it is as it's really very difficult to ascertain which category it can be put into; it neither has a clear plot nor characters are developed as they normally are, it can't be called a novel or collection of stories, can't be put in any one genre since it surpasses so many; but still something extraordinary, something which can't be described in words, which can only be felt. The book has loose dialogues between emperor- Kublai...
The photo is of new and old Shanghai, photographed by Greg Girard in 2000 (source), chronologically equidistant between my two visits there. It is, and maybe always has been, a city of contrasting, unequal, parts and pairs, like many of the Invisible Cities.“Each man bears in his mind a city made only of differences.”ListenI’ve been eavesdropping on the mysterious, hypnotic conversations between a famous explorer from antiquity and the powerful emperor of a distant land: Marco Polo and Kublai Kh...
This is my favourite Calvino book and the one I always suggest to friends to ask me for an interesting easy read or a start into Calvino's universe. It is hard to write a long review here without giving away the entire story but suffice it to say that it is poetic prose at its best. In a nutshell, Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan the various cities he has been to before his visit to China between 1271 and 1275 CE. Each description is more fanciful and beautiful than the previous and there is
I live in a city, and every day I ride the subway with people who live in different cities. Aggressively loud teenagers, exhausted laborers with grimy hands, sparkling skinny women in careful clothes, Michael Cera: I don't think they would recognize my city.But we find our city, and our city finds us, right? The Flamethrowers' artist Reno moves to a New York full of artists madly creating. Patrick Bateman is fake, and he lives in a fake New York. The Street's Lutie lives in a cruel New York, and...
Invisible Cities is a beautiful and uniquely constructed novel set in the late 13th century in the court of Kublai Khan. The Venetian explorer, Marco Polo, is captivating the Tartar Emperor with descriptions of the varied cities from his unprecedented travels. By this time, the Mongol Empire has grown to be the largest that the world has ever seen. In the future, it will only be eclipsed by the British Empire in terms of the land area under its control.The Empire has grown so large that the Grea...
