Invisible Cities by Italo CalvinoMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I often feel that Calvino could have written about a slice of cheese and would have made it interesting. William Weaver's translation is superb (at least as far as reading experience goes--I have not/can not compare it to the original). The book is full of metaphor, but instead of feeling tedious, we start to understand the metaphors as truths and not just mere symbols. The context is a fictitious conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, the founder and first emperor of the Yuan dynasty of China, and the subject of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem. Rather that set it completely in dialogue, however, the book offers vignettes of these "invisible cities" to which Marco Polo has "traveled"--the scare quotes will have to suffice here as I do not wish to offer spoilers. Occasionally dialogue from Khan and Polo interject to wax philosophical, but it is far from gratuitous. For those new to Calvino's writing, it is a great entry! It did not take me ten years to read this book---I just started it on my Kindle ten years ago and put it aside for awhile.
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