At a 1983 conference held at Columbia University, Calvino himself stated that there is no definite end to Invisible Cities because "this book was made as a polyhedron, and it has conclusions everywhere, written along all of its edges." Structure The reader can therefore play with the book's structure, and choose to follow one group or another, rather than reading the book in chronological chapters. The book has nine chapters, but there are also hidden divisions within the book: each of the 55 cities belongs to one of eleven thematic groups (explained below). In the novel, the reader finds themselves playing a game with the author, wherein they must find the patterns hidden in the book. Invisible Cities is an example of Calvino's use of combinatory literature, and shows clear influences of semiotics and structuralism. The original 13th-century travelogue shares with Calvino's novel the brief, often fantastic accounts of the cities Polo claimed to have visited, along with descriptions of the city's inhabitants, notable imports and exports, and whatever interesting tales Polo had heard about the region. Invisible Cities deconstructs an archetypal example of the travel literature genre, The Travels of Marco Polo, which depicts the journey of the famed Venetian merchant across Asia and in Yuan China ( Mongol Empire). Polo's response: "Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice." In one key exchange in the middle of the book, Kublai prods Polo to tell him of the one city he has never mentioned directly-his hometown. These interludes between the two characters are no less poetically constructed than the cities, and form a framing device that plays with the natural complexity of language and stories. Short dialogues between Kublai and Polo are interspersed every five to ten cities discussing these topics. The majority of the book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 fictitious cities that are narrated by Polo, many of which can be read as parables or meditations on culture, language, time, memory, death, or the general nature of human experience. The book is framed as a conversation between the elderly and busy emperor Kublai Khan, who constantly has merchants coming to describe the state of his expanding and vast empire, and Polo. The book explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cities by an explorer, Marco Polo.
It was published in Italy in 1972 by Giulio Einaudi Editore. There are several narrators: there is an unknown narrator who describes the garden, the emperor and Marco Polo Marco Polo is narrator himself then Marco starts speaking, using third person.Invisible Cities ( Italian: Le città invisibili) is a novel by Italian writer Italo Calvino. The most striking point about the style, in my opinion, is its shifting. The style of this book is so unusual and at the same time easy to read. The most interesting about this all is that the book, being a philosophic, to my mind, should put questions and this story instead provides answers and makes the readers (at least me) think about habits of their own cities. And the third reason to be pointed out concerns the ending of the second chapter directly, it is simply a must to see the following dialogue between the emperor and the traveler: with fewer words and more gestures, mime.Īs far as the whole story is concerned I would like to point out that it is quite philosophic, it is not about depiction of some architecture, and it is more about the habits and traditions. Maybe this place exists nearby, or maybe it is only Calvino’s imagination. I’ll read another tiny passage…” Secondly, reading this book makes you eager to find out whether all this is real after all. First of all the language of the book is very readable, and I am sure that each reader had thoughts like the following: “OK. There are a lot of reasons for that I’d numerate some of them. To my mind this book is one of those which absorb one’s attention completely, and it makes a person who started reading read it up to the end. I would like to point out that both of the main characters and the readers understand that not everything in these stories is real, but it so beautiful that it is impossible to stop listening and reading. Thus, they sit in the beautiful garden of the emperor and discuss beautiful places. Here comes Marco Polo, Venetian traveler, who starts describing different beautiful places, and he does this so well that emperor is satisfied and is eager to listen to Marco Polo. He listens to his servants’ descriptions and stories but he is not interested. This strong lord wants to know what is going on in his own empire for he even is not aware of each place in his empire.
Kublai Khan is an emperor of an empire fading away.
The first two chapters open up the story and introduce the main characters and setting.
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