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4.05 AVERAGE
4.05 AVERAGE
lighthearted
mysterious
fast-paced
adventurous
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Perhaps I read this book wrong and didn’t savor the ideas sufficiently, but I didn’t find it remarkable. There were moments of poetic grace and Borgesian fancy, but the city chapters felt like intros to 55 different sci-fi books that cut off abruptly. Many of the sentences were just random lists of adjective and noun pairs with no discernible verb to announce action other than their existence. And there were a LOT of naked women lounging around in public urban spaces to fuel the male conqueror fantasy.
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
No
challenging
inspiring
medium-paced
fantastic fantastic fantastic.
every single person should read this in their life, makes you look at the world in new eyes
every single person should read this in their life, makes you look at the world in new eyes
Continuing my sort-of-tradition of rereading this Every time i leave the country. Still Holds up! although the more i read it the more i understand Why I was so into it when i was 21, but even so!
Basically the whole book is almost entirely mini chapters in which Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan a different city in his empire and most are totally impossible and fantastical but they all contain a little observation about city livin’!
anyway i loooove it as a travel read cuz its so original and evocative and it’ll give u a lil hit of wonder, like damn ancient cities are so fuckin cool, and weird and mysterious! or it'll just give you an interesting little philosophical nugget
some favorites:
Cities and the dead 3: Where the citizens fake a second city underground and fill it with their dead positioning them doing fun things they couldn't do in life
Trading cities 3: about unsaid desires
Thin cities 2: about Rapid change in a city
City and the Sky 4: where the city founders design the city according to the stars with disturbing results.
the one thats the city suspended over a giant crevice. forgot what its called and I didn't right it down this time. still, a cool image!
could maybe be accused or orientalism in a couple places, and Calvino occasionally lets his horniness get the best of him but for the 70’s it could be a hell of a lot worse .
Basically the whole book is almost entirely mini chapters in which Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan a different city in his empire and most are totally impossible and fantastical but they all contain a little observation about city livin’!
anyway i loooove it as a travel read cuz its so original and evocative and it’ll give u a lil hit of wonder, like damn ancient cities are so fuckin cool, and weird and mysterious! or it'll just give you an interesting little philosophical nugget
some favorites:
Cities and the dead 3: Where the citizens fake a second city underground and fill it with their dead positioning them doing fun things they couldn't do in life
Trading cities 3: about unsaid desires
Thin cities 2: about Rapid change in a city
City and the Sky 4: where the city founders design the city according to the stars with disturbing results.
the one thats the city suspended over a giant crevice. forgot what its called and I didn't right it down this time. still, a cool image!
could maybe be accused or orientalism in a couple places, and Calvino occasionally lets his horniness get the best of him but for the 70’s it could be a hell of a lot worse .
"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven".
As Milton's Lucifer finds that the state of his confinement is not limited to a sedentary region but has become intrinsic to his being as an immutable nature, Calvino's Marco Polo travels constantly in search of some elusive answer coming to the final realization that the only 'place' in which we truly learn is within ourselves, in contemplation of our memories.
Arriving at each destination, Marco is never satisfied, never settled, but he knows that he never will be. In every stranger he finds a life he might have shared, had he at any time decided this was enough, and stopped. He describes skeletal cities of pipes devoid of walls, floors, or ceilings, abandoned ruins with only a web of threads tied between lost relationships whose weavers have abandoned them, and cities occupied by the living, the dead, and those who have not yet been born, each waiting to make the journey to the next. But no matter how different these places may appear, their inhabitants are always the same. The merchants who come from cities of their own to exchange memories, the brotherhood of living and dead emissaries always working to model the one from the other, the dreamers who build a city to capture a fantasy and waste their lives waiting for a woman who never existed. Though their purposes may be different, they are each of them a traveler.
Like Marco Polo, the traveler sets out with the hope of making a grand discovery, as if his feet will be the first to scrape across a desert, to dangle in a stream, as if being the first would make that land his own. Though the Khan holds the warlord's title, Marco is just as covetous, wanting all the world for his own name, though in fact all we can ever truly own are our selves, our memory, our desire, our signs, our names. And one day the Earth we have claimed will come to reclaim us, and it will own even our cities, which in building we already forfeit.
"Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much that he has not had and will never have."
As Milton's Lucifer finds that the state of his confinement is not limited to a sedentary region but has become intrinsic to his being as an immutable nature, Calvino's Marco Polo travels constantly in search of some elusive answer coming to the final realization that the only 'place' in which we truly learn is within ourselves, in contemplation of our memories.
Arriving at each destination, Marco is never satisfied, never settled, but he knows that he never will be. In every stranger he finds a life he might have shared, had he at any time decided this was enough, and stopped. He describes skeletal cities of pipes devoid of walls, floors, or ceilings, abandoned ruins with only a web of threads tied between lost relationships whose weavers have abandoned them, and cities occupied by the living, the dead, and those who have not yet been born, each waiting to make the journey to the next. But no matter how different these places may appear, their inhabitants are always the same. The merchants who come from cities of their own to exchange memories, the brotherhood of living and dead emissaries always working to model the one from the other, the dreamers who build a city to capture a fantasy and waste their lives waiting for a woman who never existed. Though their purposes may be different, they are each of them a traveler.
Like Marco Polo, the traveler sets out with the hope of making a grand discovery, as if his feet will be the first to scrape across a desert, to dangle in a stream, as if being the first would make that land his own. Though the Khan holds the warlord's title, Marco is just as covetous, wanting all the world for his own name, though in fact all we can ever truly own are our selves, our memory, our desire, our signs, our names. And one day the Earth we have claimed will come to reclaim us, and it will own even our cities, which in building we already forfeit.
"Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much that he has not had and will never have."
adventurous
challenging
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No