Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory.
"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else." In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories 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. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.
Excerpt
Invisible Cities
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. In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of ...
But if Invisible Cities did nothing but frogmarch the reader from one obvious message to another, it wouldn't be a classic of postmodern literature. Even at his headiest, Calvino was a playful writer, endlessly imaginative and inventive. The novel's tone is mostly reflective, even somber, but beneath meditations on capitalism and semiotics, there is a treasure trove of the weird and wonderful. In just a page-and-a-half, Calvino makes any given city feel more intriguing and tangible than the tedious worldbuilding of dozens of fantasy novels. Polo's stories are full of anachronisms like dirigibles and Ferris wheels, and Calvino's eerily precise prose makes the reader feel as though they're viewing pockets of existence in a great white void. Somehow, it only makes the story more plausible: we sense that we can step outside ourselves, squint into the distance, and see faint but unmistakable skylines dotting the horizon...continued
Full Review
(489 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by Joe Hoeffner).
Although Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities concerns itself with two real people, it is far from historical fiction. The Marco Polo who describes city after fantastical city to Kublai Khan broadly resembles the Venetian merchant and explorer of the 13th century: both traveled the Eastern world and (allegedly, in the real Polo's case) served in Kublai's court. But Polo's musings on memory, semiotics, and desire, not to mention the erudite, poetic language he uses in Invisible Cities, are all Calvino's invention.
In fact, the real Marco Polo didn't actually write The Travels of Marco Polo, the travelogue that made him immortal. After his return from Asia, where he spent 17 years traveling and peddling his wares, Polo joined the Venetian army...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked Invisible Cities, try these:
The Privilege of the Happy Ending
by Kij Johnson
Published 2023
A surprising and exciting new collection of speculative and experimental stories that explore animal intelligences, gender, and the nature of stories.
by Susanna Clarke
Published 2021
From the New York Times bestselling author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an intoxicating, hypnotic new novel set in a dreamlike alternative reality.
Children are not the people of tomorrow, but people today.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Three Days in June
by Anne Tyler
A new Anne Tyler novel destined to be an instant classic: a socially awkward mother of the bride navigates the days before and after her daughter's wedding.
Harlem Rhapsody
by Victoria Christopher Murray
The extraordinary story of the woman who ignited the Harlem Renaissance.
Beast of the North Woods
by Annelise Ryan
When a local fisherman is mauled to death, it seems like the only possible cause is a mythical creature.