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(Copied from an old review originally posted elsewhere.)
William Weaver's translation from the Italian of "Le citta' invisibili"
In Calvino's surreal fiction, people do things, describe things, consider things, that make no sense, or are flatly impossible. But encountering these things leads the reader to think new and interesting thoughts (or feel new and interesting ways) about life, speech, communication, thought, and (I suspect) pretty much whatever else is salient while reading.
Calvino's "Invisible Cities" is strongly surreal in this way; Marco Polo and Kublai Kahn (no, no mention of Xanadu or the sunless sea) recline at ease in the Imperial gardens, and Polo describes some of the cities he has seen in his travels (or considers describing them, or describes them by playing chess, or by waving random objects about; with Calvino, one is seldom certain). The book is structured as very short passages of one or two pages, either in the frame story of Polo and Kublai, or in the inner stories of the cities. The city stories are textually disconnected; no city is mentioned outside of its own story, and there is no thread of narrative continuity; no story comes before or after another, or clearly continues the story of another. The cities are fantastic in the literal sense: they are high above the ground on stilts, or composed of water pipes and inhabited by nyads, or reflected in a sister city of the dead buried beneath the living city, or otherwise not what you'd expect to find getting off the bus to stretch.
The prose and base narrative are the usual successful Calvino / Weaver work; the words shine nicely on the page, the individual images are, relatively often, amusing or provoking or profound. But I would not rank this with the best of Calvino's work; the form is not really harmonious with the project. It's possible to indicate a deep and interesting point in a one-or-two-page short-short, without actually bashing the reader over the head with it, but it's very hard, and even Calvino can't do it seventy-three times (there are about that many vignettes in here). Reading the book, I found the same sets of images repeated a bit too often, points made a bit too heavily, and even the occasional complete lapse. The idea that maybe we (you and me) are the only real people, and we're just dreaming the rest of the world, or maybe *vice versa*, was deep and interesting the first time it came up, sometime early freshman year, about 2 am with the smell of creme de menthe heavy in the room, but it's gotten old since then, and I doubt many readers will be impressed by Calvino's dragging it out for display basically unornamented. But that's just one of the passages, and most of the rest are much better than that.
Perhaps the book was designed to be dipped into rather than read through, and the fault is mine for having read it as though it were some other book. I'll certainly keep it around, and I expect I'll enjoy dipping into it now and then in the future, perhaps more than I did in reading it the first time. I certainly don't regret the time I've spent with it, which is reasonably high praise given how much spare reading-time I have.
So. I'd recommend this book to Calvino fans, who will definitely want it, for reading or dipping. I would not recommend it as a first taste of Calvino's surreal fiction; try Cosmicomics or "If on a winter's night a traveler" first.
%A Calvino, Italo %T Invisible Cities %O Translated by William Weaver %I Harcourt Brace & Company %I A Harvest Book %I A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book %C San Diego / New York / London %D 1972 (translation 1974) %G ISBN 0-15-645380-0 %P 165 pp. %O paperback, US$7.95
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