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A review by hellochildren
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
4.5
a book that feels like a dream
==
"With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire, or its reverse, a fear."
"Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams, with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories"
"Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice."
"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...Perhaps Adelma is the city where you arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known."
"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno we live everyday, that we form by being together."
==
Some fav and notable cities:
Diomira - envy
Isidora - old and young
Zora - unchanging
Zenobia - desires
Euphemia :) - by the fireplace
Sophronia - circus
Eutropia - diff lives
Ersilla - strings
Leandra - tiny species in homes
Baucis - above the cloud
Adelma - faces of the dead
Eusapia - land of the dead and the living
Leonia - daily refashioning
Irene - diff names
==
"With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire, or its reverse, a fear."
"Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams, with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories"
"Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice."
"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...Perhaps Adelma is the city where you arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known."
"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno we live everyday, that we form by being together."
==
Some fav and notable cities:
Diomira - envy
Isidora - old and young
Zora - unchanging
Zenobia - desires
Euphemia :) - by the fireplace
Sophronia - circus
Eutropia - diff lives
Ersilla - strings
Leandra - tiny species in homes
Baucis - above the cloud
Adelma - faces of the dead
Eusapia - land of the dead and the living
Leonia - daily refashioning
Irene - diff names