Take a photo of a barcode or cover
orestesfasting 's review for:
Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
emotional
hopeful
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
Once every few years, you read a book that alters how you see the world, the sort of book that you read deliberately slowly to savour every sentence. This is one such book - easily a top 5 book of all time, even beating Winter's Night. It's a book that asks you to configure and reconfigure the same images in your head, because all our imagined cities are of course built from the same memories, but reunderstood each time we reconfigure them, meaning something else, until the multiplicity of the world we live in nearly engulfs us in possibility. Calvino's sparse style is perfect here - elegant but short, always leaving more to our minds to map out. Words are signifiers, but he makes his readers work just as hard as he does, and never has it felt more true that there is a different book here for every reader, just as there are infinite invisible cities.