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4.05 AVERAGE
4.05 AVERAGE
challenging
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
N/A
reflective
fast-paced
Uzun zamandır ne doğru düzgün bir şeyler okuyabiliyorum ne de buraya bakabiliyorum. Ancak hazır fırsat bulmuşken, gelişigüzel açıp okuduğum bölümler dışında baştan sona da iki kez bitirdiğim bu kitap için birkaç cümle yazayım.
Calvino'nun Görünmez Kentler'i okuru tuhaf bir yolculuğa çıkarıyor. Marco Polo'nun Kubilay Han'ın emriyle gidip gördüğü şehirleri dinliyoruz Han ile beraber. Ama Polo'nun şehirleri hem bize çok yabancı hem de bir kentte yaşamış herkesin ucundan kenarından tanıyacağı yerler.
Açıkçası ilk sayfalarda var olmayan kentlerin kısa kısa anlatıldığı bu anlatımı oldukça garipsedim, fakat bir noktada beynimdeki o bariyeri aştığımda Calvino'nun belli duygular, düşünceler üzerine kurduğu bu konsept kentler kafamda gitgide şekil almaya başladı. Polo'nun Yüce Han ile yaptığı sohbetler de okuru bir nevi Han'ın yerine koyup kitabı anlamamız için bir rehber işlevi görüyor.
Kitabın matematiksel tarafı ve okurla oynadığı çeşitli oyunlar üzerine bir şeyler söyleyemeyeceğim çünkü bunların her okurda farklı bir deneyim oluşturacağına inanıyorum. Ama Calvino'nun oulipoculuğunu konuşturduğunu söylemek zor değil.
Velhasılı tekrar tekrar, farklı zamanlarda ve hatta farklı şekillerde okunup içinde kaybolunacak bir eser Görünmez Kentler. Her damağa uygun bir lezzet olduğunu düşünmüyorum; anlatının kendisini zorlamasından, kendisiyle oynamasından çekinmeyen okurlar büyük zevk alacaktır.
Bu arada benim gözümde okuduğum Görünmez Kentler Calvino'ya olduğu kadar çevirmeni Işıl Saatçıoğlu'na da aittir, yazar kadar ona da minnettarım bu kitap için.
"Ben konuşur, konuşurum," der Marco, "ama beni dinleyen, duymak istediğini duyar yalnızca. Senin heyecanla kulak kabarttığın dünya başka, kendi sokaklarıma döndüğümde hamal ve gondolcuların arasında dolaşacak hikayeler başka olacak, eğer Cenevizli korsanlara esir düşüp macera romanları kaleme alan bir yazıcıyla aynı hücrede zincire vurulursam, geç yaşta ona yazdıracağım dünya ise bambaşka olacak. Anlatıya yön veren şey, ses değil kulaktır."
Calvino'nun Görünmez Kentler'i okuru tuhaf bir yolculuğa çıkarıyor. Marco Polo'nun Kubilay Han'ın emriyle gidip gördüğü şehirleri dinliyoruz Han ile beraber. Ama Polo'nun şehirleri hem bize çok yabancı hem de bir kentte yaşamış herkesin ucundan kenarından tanıyacağı yerler.
Açıkçası ilk sayfalarda var olmayan kentlerin kısa kısa anlatıldığı bu anlatımı oldukça garipsedim, fakat bir noktada beynimdeki o bariyeri aştığımda Calvino'nun belli duygular, düşünceler üzerine kurduğu bu konsept kentler kafamda gitgide şekil almaya başladı. Polo'nun Yüce Han ile yaptığı sohbetler de okuru bir nevi Han'ın yerine koyup kitabı anlamamız için bir rehber işlevi görüyor.
Kitabın matematiksel tarafı ve okurla oynadığı çeşitli oyunlar üzerine bir şeyler söyleyemeyeceğim çünkü bunların her okurda farklı bir deneyim oluşturacağına inanıyorum. Ama Calvino'nun oulipoculuğunu konuşturduğunu söylemek zor değil.
Velhasılı tekrar tekrar, farklı zamanlarda ve hatta farklı şekillerde okunup içinde kaybolunacak bir eser Görünmez Kentler. Her damağa uygun bir lezzet olduğunu düşünmüyorum; anlatının kendisini zorlamasından, kendisiyle oynamasından çekinmeyen okurlar büyük zevk alacaktır.
Bu arada benim gözümde okuduğum Görünmez Kentler Calvino'ya olduğu kadar çevirmeni Işıl Saatçıoğlu'na da aittir, yazar kadar ona da minnettarım bu kitap için.
"Ben konuşur, konuşurum," der Marco, "ama beni dinleyen, duymak istediğini duyar yalnızca. Senin heyecanla kulak kabarttığın dünya başka, kendi sokaklarıma döndüğümde hamal ve gondolcuların arasında dolaşacak hikayeler başka olacak, eğer Cenevizli korsanlara esir düşüp macera romanları kaleme alan bir yazıcıyla aynı hücrede zincire vurulursam, geç yaşta ona yazdıracağım dünya ise bambaşka olacak. Anlatıya yön veren şey, ses değil kulaktır."
challenging
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Will probably expand my thoughts on subsequent reads, but the simple beauty of Calvino’s prose mixes perfectly with the abstract subject matter, moving fluidly between playfulness, horror, profound sadness. Lovely.
I’m sorry but I’m not. If I wanted to know about cities I would’ve picked up one of those blue travel books.
Favorite cities: Zirma, Fedora, Valdrada, Eutropia, Ersilia, Esmeralda, Eusapia, Thekla, Raissa
Favorite excerpts:
In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them.
All these beauties will already be familiar to the visitor, who has seen them also in other cities. But the special quality of this city
for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman’s voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.
A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
...your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave.
Outside, the land stretches, empty, to the horizon; the sky opens, with speeding clouds. In the shape that chance and wind give the clouds, you are already intent on recognizing figures: a sailing ship, a hand, an elephant. . . .
...because the traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man’s place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else’s present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
“Journeys to relive your past?” was the Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: “Journeys to recover your future?”
And Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”
sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times
even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old postcards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.
...it is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.
There is no language without deceit.
If men and women began to live their ephemeral dreams, every phantom would become a person with whom to begin a story of pursuits, pretenses, misunderstandings, clashes, oppressions, and the carousel of fantasies would stop.
Yes, the empire is sick, and, what is worse, it is trying to become accustomed to its sores. This is the aim of my explorations: examining the traces of happiness still to be glimpsed, I gauge its short supply.
...you would like to say what it is, but everything previously said of Aglaura imprisons your words and obliges you to repeat rather than say
“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Polo said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”
You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more
faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.
“I speak and speak,” Marco says, “but the listener retains only the words he is expecting".
It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.
...in the seed of the city of the just, a malignant seed is hidden, in its turn: the certainty and pride of being in the right – and of
being more just than many others who call themselves more just than the just. This seed ferments in bitterness, rivalry, resentment; and the natural desire of revenge on the unjust is colored by a yearning to be in their place and to act as they do.
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day,
that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
Favorite excerpts:
Spoiler
In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them.
All these beauties will already be familiar to the visitor, who has seen them also in other cities. But the special quality of this city
for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman’s voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.
A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
...your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave.
Outside, the land stretches, empty, to the horizon; the sky opens, with speeding clouds. In the shape that chance and wind give the clouds, you are already intent on recognizing figures: a sailing ship, a hand, an elephant. . . .
...because the traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man’s place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else’s present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
“Journeys to relive your past?” was the Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: “Journeys to recover your future?”
And Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”
sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times
even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old postcards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.
...it is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.
There is no language without deceit.
If men and women began to live their ephemeral dreams, every phantom would become a person with whom to begin a story of pursuits, pretenses, misunderstandings, clashes, oppressions, and the carousel of fantasies would stop.
Yes, the empire is sick, and, what is worse, it is trying to become accustomed to its sores. This is the aim of my explorations: examining the traces of happiness still to be glimpsed, I gauge its short supply.
...you would like to say what it is, but everything previously said of Aglaura imprisons your words and obliges you to repeat rather than say
“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Polo said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”
You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more
faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.
“I speak and speak,” Marco says, “but the listener retains only the words he is expecting".
It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.
...in the seed of the city of the just, a malignant seed is hidden, in its turn: the certainty and pride of being in the right – and of
being more just than many others who call themselves more just than the just. This seed ferments in bitterness, rivalry, resentment; and the natural desire of revenge on the unjust is colored by a yearning to be in their place and to act as they do.
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day,
that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
Read it for a class, beautiful imagery, loved analyzing the text. I loved how the cities were categorized and the fact that there were various ways/ orders the book could be read. This is the kind of book you could read over and over and you would find something new to fixate on.
This book is more of a thought experiment than a story. It reminded me very strongly of the book Einstein's Dreams, by Alan Lightman, which is a thought experiment about time, whereas Calvino's is about cities. Between the two I strongly prefer the former, although it's hard to say why.
Made me think about every word. Like many of its cities, the book is woven tightly by themes that cross the entire text. A good read for those interested in the use of language, image, and theme to make a story real.