A review by jiyoung
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

3.0

Perhaps I read this book wrong and didn’t savor the ideas sufficiently, but I didn’t find it remarkable. There were moments of poetic grace and Borgesian fancy, but the city chapters felt like intros to 55 different sci-fi books that cut off abruptly. Many of the sentences were just random lists of adjective and noun pairs with no discernible verb to announce action other than their existence. And there were a LOT of naked women lounging around in public urban spaces to fuel the male conqueror fantasy.