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4.05 AVERAGE
4.05 AVERAGE
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
پیشاپیش و در پرانتز بگویم متأسفم که این کتاب را پیش از [b:هفت پیکر|317169|هفت پیکر|نظامی گنجوی|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/50x75-a91bf249278a81aabab721ef782c4a74.png|7377306] نظامی می‌خوانم. گویا این اثر با الهام از آن نوشته شده است. چه نویسنده در کتاب [b:چرا باید کلاسیک‌ها را خواند|2255929|چرا باید کلاسیک‌ها را خواند|Italo Calvino|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1271638834s/2255929.jpg|1194952] شیفتگی خود را به آن ابراز داشته.
این کتاب هم‌زمان مرا یاد [b:صد سال تنهایی|894468|صد سال تنهایی|Gabriel García Márquez|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1363534430s/894468.jpg|3295655] مارکز و [b:هفتاد سنگ قبر|311704|هفتاد سنگ قبر|یدالله رؤیائی|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1200232763s/311704.jpg|302629] یدالله رؤیایی می‌انداخت!
ترجمه‌ی فرزام پروا خیلی بلندپروازانه و آهنگین و رنگین و روان بود اما حیف، مترجم، درست همان اشاره‌ی ظریفی را که نویسنده میان متن هر شهر تعبیه کرده فهم نکرده است و رویش یک ماله‌ی بزرگ کشیده و شهر را ویران کرده است. حیف. ترجمه‌ی بهمن رئیسی را خواندم که دقیق اما دش‌خوار بود و هر از چندگاه به یادت می‌آورد این کتاب ترجمه است.
این کتاب هم‌زمان مرا یاد [b:صد سال تنهایی|894468|صد سال تنهایی|Gabriel García Márquez|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1363534430s/894468.jpg|3295655] مارکز و [b:هفتاد سنگ قبر|311704|هفتاد سنگ قبر|یدالله رؤیائی|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1200232763s/311704.jpg|302629] یدالله رؤیایی می‌انداخت!
ترجمه‌ی فرزام پروا خیلی بلندپروازانه و آهنگین و رنگین و روان بود اما حیف، مترجم، درست همان اشاره‌ی ظریفی را که نویسنده میان متن هر شهر تعبیه کرده فهم نکرده است و رویش یک ماله‌ی بزرگ کشیده و شهر را ویران کرده است. حیف. ترجمه‌ی بهمن رئیسی را خواندم که دقیق اما دش‌خوار بود و هر از چندگاه به یادت می‌آورد این کتاب ترجمه است.
adventurous
challenging
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
adventurous
slow-paced
adventurous
relaxing
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
This is the story about the descriptions and the environment, the power of imagination and the sense of life thus there is no plot nor characters. The magical, unique and fantastic cities are the characters and it is hard not to enjoy such a new and unexpected story. I enjoyed my time with this book and gave it 4 stars, another 0.25 for the beauty of the language and the manner of describing the places and thoughts.
The prose in this book was beautiful albeit fleeting as none of it stuck within my memory.
It is definitely a work of art... I just don't aptly appreciate it.
It is definitely a work of art... I just don't aptly appreciate it.
Oof, this book really took me by surprise. I knew nothing about its form and even knowing wouldn't help me at all, since this book is pretty hard to describe. It doesn't really fit into any category and it was unlike anything I had read before it.
If you're expecting this to be a book with a plot, or even characters to follow... yeah, it's not that kind of thing. The cities described, as I saw it, were just constructions so the author could speak philosophically through the structure or story of each city. And that he did very beautifully and lyrically.
If you're expecting this to be a book with a plot, or even characters to follow... yeah, it's not that kind of thing. The cities described, as I saw it, were just constructions so the author could speak philosophically through the structure or story of each city. And that he did very beautifully and lyrically.
I cannot praise this book highly enough as an example of experimental fiction, flash fiction, prose poetry, and as art. I was hesitant at first to read this, due to the premise which did seem experimental and perhaps "too loose" but I couldn't have been more wrong! This is not a book for everyone (definitely not a novel) but it's a must-read for writers of all stripes!
Recommended to: writers, poets, spiritual or philosophical readers, your friend who keeps trying to get you into meditation
Recommended to: writers, poets, spiritual or philosophical readers, your friend who keeps trying to get you into meditation
challenging
funny
hopeful
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
fav quotes:
My memory includes dirigibles flying in all directions, at window level; streets of shops where tattoos are drawn on sailors' skin; underground trains crammed with women suffering from the humidity. My traveling companions, on the other hand, swear they saw only one dirigible hovering among the city's spires, only one tattoo artist arranging needles and inks and pierced patterns on his bench, only one fat woman fanning herself on the train platform. Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.
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.
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.
True, also in Hypatia the day will come when my only desire will be to leave. I know I must not go down to the harbor then, but climb the citadel's highest pinnacle and wait for a ship to go by up there. But will it ever go by? There is no language without deceit.
At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping.
Even when lovers twist their naked bodies, skin against skin, seeking the position that will give one the most pleasure in the other, even when murderers plunge the knife into the black veins of the neck and more clotted blood pours out the more they press the blade that slips between the tendons, it is not so much their copulating or murdering that matters as the copulating or murdering of the images, limpid and cold in the mirror.
"Set out, explore every coast, and seek this city," the Khan says to Marco. "Then come back and tell me if my dream corresponds to reality."
"Forgive me, my lord, there is no doubt that sooner or later I shall set sail from that dock," Marco says, "but I shall not come back to tell you about it. The city exists and it has a simple secret: it only knows departures, not returns."
And Polo said: "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."
In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.
(Baucis, in the trees): There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, and contemplating with fascination their own absence.
At times it may happen that a sole person will simultaneously take on two or more roles--tyrant, benefactor, messenger--or one role may be doubled, multiplied, assigned to a hundred, a thousand inhabitors of Melania: three thousand for the hypocrite, thirty thousand for the sponger, a hundred thousand king's sons fallen in low estate and awaiting recognition.
"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.
And then the shards of the original splendor that had been saved, by adapting them to more obscure needs, were again shifted. They were now preserved under glass bells, locked in display cases, set on velvet cushions, and not because they might still be used for anything, but because people wanted to reconstruct through them a city of which no one else knew anything now.
a tin can, an old tire, an unraveled wine flask, if it rolls toward Leonia, is enough to bring with it an avalanche of unmated shoes, calendars of bygone years, withered flowers, submerging the city in its own past, which it had tried in vain to reject, mingling with the past of the neighboring cities, finally clean.
"What is the aim of a city under construction unless it is a city? Where is the plan you are following, the blueprint?"
"We will show it to you as soon as the working day is over; we cannot interrupt our work now," they answer.
"Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.
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.
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.
True, also in Hypatia the day will come when my only desire will be to leave. I know I must not go down to the harbor then, but climb the citadel's highest pinnacle and wait for a ship to go by up there. But will it ever go by? There is no language without deceit.
At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping.
Even when lovers twist their naked bodies, skin against skin, seeking the position that will give one the most pleasure in the other, even when murderers plunge the knife into the black veins of the neck and more clotted blood pours out the more they press the blade that slips between the tendons, it is not so much their copulating or murdering that matters as the copulating or murdering of the images, limpid and cold in the mirror.
"Set out, explore every coast, and seek this city," the Khan says to Marco. "Then come back and tell me if my dream corresponds to reality."
"Forgive me, my lord, there is no doubt that sooner or later I shall set sail from that dock," Marco says, "but I shall not come back to tell you about it. The city exists and it has a simple secret: it only knows departures, not returns."
And Polo said: "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."
In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.
(Baucis, in the trees): There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, and contemplating with fascination their own absence.
At times it may happen that a sole person will simultaneously take on two or more roles--tyrant, benefactor, messenger--or one role may be doubled, multiplied, assigned to a hundred, a thousand inhabitors of Melania: three thousand for the hypocrite, thirty thousand for the sponger, a hundred thousand king's sons fallen in low estate and awaiting recognition.
"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.
And then the shards of the original splendor that had been saved, by adapting them to more obscure needs, were again shifted. They were now preserved under glass bells, locked in display cases, set on velvet cushions, and not because they might still be used for anything, but because people wanted to reconstruct through them a city of which no one else knew anything now.
a tin can, an old tire, an unraveled wine flask, if it rolls toward Leonia, is enough to bring with it an avalanche of unmated shoes, calendars of bygone years, withered flowers, submerging the city in its own past, which it had tried in vain to reject, mingling with the past of the neighboring cities, finally clean.
"What is the aim of a city under construction unless it is a city? Where is the plan you are following, the blueprint?"
"We will show it to you as soon as the working day is over; we cannot interrupt our work now," they answer.
"Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.