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4.05 AVERAGE
4.05 AVERAGE
adventurous
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
The beginning was intriguing, the middle was getting boring to me, but the last thirty ish pages are my favorite and whimsical and why I enjoy the book.
Let me just say: I’m entirely biased. I love Italo Calvino’s works. This was another beautiful collections of tales about fictional cities visited by a fictional Marco Polo told to a fictional Kublai Khan. This book was very a lá EINSTEIN DREAMS which was a collection of different ways time flows in different worlds. I’d recommend this book to anyone who:
I loved this book as a companion to Christopher Chen’s The Late Wedding… as a stand-alone book it is so unlike anything else I’ve ever read, but not necessarily something I would ever gravitate towards. As an actor though, there are so many great nuggets in the original book that can be useful for work on the show!
"I speak and speak," Marco [Polo] says [to Kublai Khan], "but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of my return is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life, if I were taken prisoner by Genoese pirates and put in irons in the same cell with a writer of adventure stories. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear."
…
"And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of the scaffolding, "Darling, let me dip into it," to a young serving-maid who holds up a dish of ragout under the pergola, happy to serve it to the umbrella-maker who is celebrating a successful transaction, a white lace parasol bought to display at the races by a great lady in love with an officer who has smiled at her taking the last jump, happy man, and still happier his horse, flying over the obstacles, seeing a francolin flying in the sky, happy bird freed from its cage by a painter happy at having painted it feather by feather, speckled with red and yellow in the illumination of that page in the volume where the philosopher says: "Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy cit contains a happy city unaware of its own existence"
…
"And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of the scaffolding, "Darling, let me dip into it," to a young serving-maid who holds up a dish of ragout under the pergola, happy to serve it to the umbrella-maker who is celebrating a successful transaction, a white lace parasol bought to display at the races by a great lady in love with an officer who has smiled at her taking the last jump, happy man, and still happier his horse, flying over the obstacles, seeing a francolin flying in the sky, happy bird freed from its cage by a painter happy at having painted it feather by feather, speckled with red and yellow in the illumination of that page in the volume where the philosopher says: "Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy cit contains a happy city unaware of its own existence"
I can't remember any book I've ever read that seemed to be a fully formed fairytale. It's a book out of time. It could have been written 200 years ago. It's beautiful and poetic and weird and wonderful. It's a book you can pick up and read any random page and it will be a positive experience.
mysterious
slow-paced
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced