Invisible Cities

by Italo Calvino Narrated by Richard Higgins

Overview

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” - from*Invisible Cities

In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo - Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.

“Invisible Cities*changed the way we read and what is possible in the balance between poetry and prose . . . The book I would choose as pillow and plate, alone on a desert island.” - Jeanette Winterson

Editorial Reviews

Gore Vidal

Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.
—New York Review of Books

Publishers Weekly - Audio

11/25/2013
At its most basic level, Calvino’s novel is a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, as the former describes the fantastical cities and landscapes he’s visited during his explorations. Of course, this is severely understating the scope of Calvino’s book, which at times feels like a novel, at times like a travelogue about a voyage to mysterious and imaginary places, and at times like a series of puzzles. John Lee is the perfect performer to depict the disorienting nature of Calvino’s masterpiece. Lee has become the go-to narrator for stories with unusual structures and ideas—he previously narrated China Mieville’s The City & the City and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. In this audio edition, Lee’s clipped, accented elocution encapsulates the mystery that permeates the novel’s numerous settings. But Lee also adds interesting details throughout his reading—for instance he beautifully captures Marco Polo’s charisma and showmanship as he crows about his findings to Khan. Despite narrating a book with no discernible plot, this is a truly entertaining and electrifying performance. A Harcourt Brace Jovanovich paperback. (June)

The New York Review of Books Gore Vidal

Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.

From the Publisher

"Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant." ---Gore Vidal, The New York Review of Books

SEPTEMBER 2013 - AudioFile

No matter how good the narrator—and John Lee is quite fine here, precise and elegant—some books are difficult to put across in audio. In Calvino’s 1972 classic, Marco Polo describes the cities he visited on his expeditions to Kublai Khan. You must set aside everything you expect in a novel, such as character or plot, and be prepared after each city's description to think about what it means and how it fits into the book. Lee never rushes, but you may still feel the need to pause and reflect before going on. You may even want to look at a map as this is a work that talks a lot about atlases. Or you can just sink into the music of Lee's voice. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175807425
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/26/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	964,345

Videos