After having started to read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, my way of approaching
literature and works of art has changed completely. Painters believe that art is
a way of viewing human condition in a different way. Musicians believe that tunes
and melodies are able to convey things that cannot be expressed through words. Writers
believe that literature reflects the human condition, as well as society’s
hopes and dreams.
In this book, Calvino uses a technique much like the one
employed by Hemmingway, where they both start their works by jumping straight
into the action without introducing the setting, characters, or giving a reader
any sort of clue as to what the story is about. As a reader, you are left to
look over the writing for any type of clues that will help you understand what
is really going on and start getting a clear image of the events that are
taking place.
However, this book goes beyond that. Not only do you have to
draw conclusions from the limited descriptions offered by Marco Polo to Kublai
Khan of each city he visited, you also get the hard task of deciding in what
order you wish to start reading the book. There is a reason why Calvino chose
to place the chapters in their respective order, but there was also a reason
why he named some of the chapters the same, and why he placed specific numbers
next to them as well.
This book can not only be read in many different ways, but
it can be interpreted in various forms as well. Calvino describes his cities in
such a way that the reader is able to imagine a part of it, making the
experience of reading this particular book a completely different one for every
person who reads it.
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