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Book Reviewed by: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.
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)
(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...
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