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Summary: Amazing upon Amazing
Review: Imaginative and spell-binding, this book captures the sense of the myriad impressions and creative impulses that occur to the creative mind going through life on earth, with its physical and metaphysical worlds co-existing simultaneously. Not linear fiction with a plot and characters and narrative structure, instead, this book is like a leaf that drifts on a beautiful breeze, past gorgeous ideas and striking images. This book is the opposite of everything that is mundane and routine in the world.
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Summary: A dreamer's book
Review: Cities of dreams, cities of desire, subtle cities ... this book is an ode to all the possible cities one can dream, their most uncanny features described whit the unemotional precision of a chronicler, as is Marco Polo in this book describing them to Kubla Khan (maybe in the "sunny pleasure dome whit caves of ice") A surrealist work of art, lacking only the flying cities of Storm Constantine's "Calenture" which Italo Calvino would have liked.
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Summary: Create your own city
Review: In this wonderful litle book, an imaginary Marco Polo tells an equally fictional Kublai Khan the story of his many travels through the Mogol Empire, and all the cities he has known. They both know it's all in Polo's brain, but who cares, the imaginary cities are so vivid, so visually possible, that the emperor keeps demanding more of them.Calvino really lets his imagination get high, to create the most bizarre, beautiful, horrible and crazy cities as any you yourself can imagine. Cities of all places, ages, shapes and peculiarities come to your mind. Calvino is really good at depicting impossible places, but also places that somehow remind you of real cities you've been to. A remarkable work of imagination, well written, this is the ideal book to read in a dreamy scenery, but also in one of these quasi-impossible cities we humans have created, the craziest ones, such as NY, LA, Tokyo, Mexico City, etc.
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Summary: A feast for the senses
Review: Eschewing all conventional literary forms, Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" is a series of short sketches of imaginary cities visited by the mercurial explorer Marco Polo, who tells his tales to Kublai Khan, the saturnine Mongol emperor who is nearing the end of his triumphant days. But this is a work of anachronistic fantasy, and it soon becomes apparent that the cities have nothing to do with the 13th century or the Mongol empire, but exist in all times and places, or only in the mind. The roughly fifty cities that Marco Polo describes are of such wild variety and curious construction, one has to wonder where Calvino gets his inspiration (aside from the obvious influence of Borges). Marco Polo tells of Dorothea, a city that is divided like a tic-tac-toe board by four intersecting canals; Despina, a city that appears as a ship to a traveler approaching by camel, and a camel to a traveler approaching by ship; the eerily surreal Armilla, consisting of nothing but water pipes ending in plumbing fixtures; Olinda, a city which blossoms like a flower in concentric circles, evoking visions of self-generating fractals. Some of the cities seem to symbolize concepts that apply to the real world. Especially portentous is the "spider-web" city of Octavia, which hangs from a rope suspended between two mountain precipices; its inhabitants are less uncertain of their future than those of other cities because they at least *know* that someday the rope will break. And Perinthia, a city that was designed under celestial guidance but whose inhabitants have turned out grotesque, offers ironic commentary on science mixing with religion. Encompassing the sights, sounds, aromas, and sentiments of a world of human experience, "Invisible Cities" is a feast for the senses, beautifully penned by one of the truly great fabulists of the twentieth century.
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Summary: A wonderful accomplishment
Review: A city in which desires are fulfilled, but only as memories; a city dwelled by people the visitor knows, but are already dead; a city in which people exchange lives; a city I which people relate though staring at each other, thus always desiring and never fulfilling... Calvino accomplishes an impossible wonder: a surprising book about man and reality, both simple and complex, with a repetitive but surprising structure, without characters (virtually) yet warm and beautiful. Invisible Cities is a masterpiece that reminded me of the great Borges, where poetry and philosophy help to shape an intimate beauty. This is true literature.
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Summary: Calvino's Cities
Review: Calvino is addictive. The beauty of his words and imagination captures your heart, sending one off into fantastic dreams and new horizons. 'Invisible Cities' is philisophical, witty, and as factual as it is folklore. Each short story is distinct and yet related to the others, and each provides incite into cities, life, and human behavior. I especially recommend this book for architects, film students, philosophers, and anyone interested in mythology and folklore.
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Summary: a must own! ...
Review: i read excerpts from this book a couple years before i got into architecture school, it was one of the things that helped give me that final push into choosing architecture as my major. i bought the book, and read it, and then read it a couple more times. every time i read invisible cities i got something new from it! i made the mistake of loaning it to a friend...who lost it! now i have to buy it again, its more than worth it. any personal library should not be without this book! calvino has a way of writing that is irreplicable, trust me i know. BUY THIS BOOK NOW, AND READ IT OVER AND OVER AGAIN!
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Summary: BORING AND REPETITIVE
Review: i had to read this for school, i hated it. its boring and repetitive. you can read the first 2 or 3 chapters and thats all you need, because it doesnt change. its just the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over again and again.. but i guess some people like that sort of thing.
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Summary: This simple parable will appeal to fans of magical realism.
Review: This short book is both a parable about power and a wonderful compendium of magical places as enchanting as the late medieval traveler's tales that Calvino has clearly absorbed. The aged dictator Khan sits at the edge of a vast empire that he has never actually toured. The nimble Marco Polo, by contrast, possesses no territory; only the memory of his many travels. Like Sheherazade recounting her thousand-and-one tales, Polo finds himself in the position of having to recollect for Khan the descriptions of the many cities that he ostensibly possesses. Polo thus becomes the Khan's only source for information about the cities in his territory; hence their 'invisibility.' But the descriptions he gives of the cities seem increasingly fantastic and elaborate. The Khan is skeptical. Polo, for his part, insists that he is being frank. The question at the center of the book becomes: who possesses these cities? Kublai Khan, or Marco Polo? What are we to make of the possibility that Polo, for all his protestations, is being less than honest with the Khan? In which case, do the cities exist only in the traveler's imagination? If so, is the Khan's empire therefore merely a dream and an invention? The brevity of each section (1 to 3 pages) and the sensual pleasures Calvino's descriptions provoke makes this book exquisite bed-time reading. In fact, older children would probably also enjoy the beauty of this charming tale.
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Summary: Subtle and Surreal
Review: This book, if any, merits more than a single, swift reading. It is a rare gem which should be savored gradually. Each section a slight glimpse of the sublime, Invisible Cities, if you allow it, may prove a valuable lifelong companion.
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