It is an innovative story that has been profoundly influential in literary, architectural and many other creative fields, and consequently Invisible Cities is considered a remarkable and masterful book. Invisible Cities gives way to a collection of bizarre, beautiful, horrible and terrifying cities - although at times strangely familiar and other times terrifically impossible. These various encounters, the constructions of imagined cities, are filled with persuasive imagery, rich in architectural form and offer suggestive in cultural and social metaphors as a comment on the nature of our perceptions and rituals. Invisible Cities Italo Calvino, read by John Lee. Unbeknown to Khan, Polo is describing, over and over again, the myriad of invented forms of Venice - the very city they both dwell in. Italo Calvino uses sublime prose to evoke the extraordinary and yet illusory endeavours of a young Marco Polo, who describes to the Kublai Khan, the exotic and global encounters he pretends to have witnessed. To amend this, listen to Polo’s observation, “it is not the voice that commands the story it is the ear.Victoria writes: Invisible Cities is a brilliant novel about the dominance of imagination, the lust of desire, the power of the Other and the evocative nature of 'story'. In Invisible Cities Marco Polo conjures up cities of magical times for his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, but gradually it. Imaginary conversations between Marco Polo and his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, conjure up cities of magical times. Within the cohesive empire, the utopian ideal of the cities remains unachieved - whether aimed through the ontological set-up of Plato’s Ideal City in The Republic, or down the centuries, when Calvino sat to write about the cities, which could not be validated. Khan’s aspiration to systematically bracket Polo’s accounts echoes the political realities. At every step, Polo defeats the purpose of the frames and questions its boundaries that refrain him from putting the blocks together. To have a better understanding of Polo’s narration, Khan deploys - chessboard and atlas - as the predetermined tools to lend a structure to Polo’s commentary. Inevitably, it barred me from reading the book under the lens of political empire and sovereign logics. Under the current context, while rereading the text, I was taken by surprise that in the past, I had been caught within the poetic-philosophy framework of the cities. Largely, the text’s liminal position between modern and postmodern forms catches the attention of the readers and critic alike. Even the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge has dedicated a long poem Kubla Khan to the ‘slight disposition’ of the emperor of the Tartars who ruled as far as the regions of current day EuroAsia.Įarly sailing ship for voyages of discovery Image Credit: Courtesy of Creative Commons Even if the cities documented in the book are as fantastical as the Be'er Sheva, the travel accounts of the real-time Italian explorer Marco Polo and Kublai Khan’s court were made popular in the 13th century Italian Renaissance with a travelogue The Travels of Marco Polo written down by Rustichello da Pisa and Polo. The second part holds true for this book - with less than 150 pages it would force you to take long pauses before turning a page and often even moving to the next paragraph to understand the meaning of the unsaid ‘between the lines’. The story loosely revolves around meetings between an aging Kublai Khan, Tartar emperor, and a young Marco Polo, Venetian merchant. If the cover of the book does not affirm the quality of the book, then the number of pages is nowhere the yardstick to measure the intensity of the read. At times delightfully whimsical and intensely melancholic, Invisible Cities is a testament to the power of an author at the height of his powers to provoke, enthrall, and connect. My first encounter of the bond between these two countries came with the two protagonists - Venetian traveller Marco Polo and the Tartars emperor Kublai Khan - of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, published in 1972. Book cover of Invisible Cities Image Credit: Courtesy of the author In November of 1972, the Italian writer Italo Calvino published a tiny book called Le citt invisibili (Invisible cities).
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