A book review on - INVISIBLE CITIES by Italo Calvino

This is my first book review ever and I am so pumped to share my views on this book to all of you book lovers.

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Invisible Cities is a collection of 55 stories, each with a city as its theme. This book is basically a travelogue. The speaker talks about different fictional cities and explains their characteristics.

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The first story in the book was written in 1968 and is about Marco Polo's travels to Kublai Khan's court. The author Italo Calvino has said that the idea for this novel came from his own experience as a dreamer who visited cities during the night while awake. In this review, I will explain why Invisible Cities is such an important work of fiction and how it can be enjoyed by readers who love fantasy novels or just want to explore their surroundings while sleeping!

Marco Polo is a prisoner of the Khan in his splendid palace.

The book is a collection of stories, but it's also a story about Marco Polo. Italo Calvino does an excellent job at exploring how we think about our own selves and how we relate to others through the lens of stories.

The narrator is Marco Polo (Polo being Italian for "son"). He's not only narrating his own life story, but he's also telling us what he thinks about other people—their motivations, their actions and reactions to events around them—in order to explain why they do what they do. In other words: while you might be reading something written by another person (like this review), you're also reading something written by yourself!

He recounts to the Khan his travels as an explorer, telling him 55 tales of the many cities he has visited.

The book begins with Polo's recounting of his travels. He tells the Khan 55 tales of the many cities he has visited, each city representing a state of mind. The stories are told in a dream-like manner as if they were being told by someone else, who is unable to communicate directly with Polo.

Each city represents a state of mind and evokes a dream.

Invisible Cities is a book about cities, but it’s not about the physical cities. Italo Calvino invented his imaginary cities, which are like dreams. The narrator explains that there are invisible cities: “a place where nothing exists except for your memory of it and mine; a city seen from afar or in passing through a landscape where everything was still present but without being visible: men, trees and birds…”

The dream reader travels alongside Polo, exploring for himself the fantastic cities.

The narrator of Invisible Cities is the dream reader. The dream reader travels alongside Polo, exploring for himself the fantastic cities. In this sense, he is also an author and reader simultaneously: he has read Polo's book as well as written it; he has found himself in this text by reading it and by writing about it; but he also feels like an author because his writing about something makes him feel like another kind of reader.

The narrator's experience of reading and writing mirrors our own: we experience something through texts that we then turn into our own thoughts and feelings—we consume them (or make them up) while at the same time creating new ways of seeing things or thinking about them ourselves! This creates a complex relationship between readers/writers/authors who are all at once conscious consumers but also creative producers in their own right

Conclusion

The dream city is a place where all of humanity can find refuge from the everyday world. It is a city that you can enter and leave, but never forget. The book is about this dream city and how we might be able to achieve it through education, art, science, culture and communication.

I hope this gave all of you a gist of what the book is all about. It's a very thought provoking book. It took me a while to understand the book , but once I read all of it , I came to realise what the book might be about from my perspective. Thank you so much for reading this far , stay tuned for more book reviews cause there will definitely be more !