Invisible Cities

By: Italo Calvino

Narrated by: Richard Higgins

“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

Awful Narration

Mispronounced words, strange cadence. Hard to review the story, given that the narration made it very hard to follow.

It was descriptive.

Was a little bit boring. was also a bit short. I liked how he discussed different locations.

Worth a Second Read

For a short book, Invisible Cities carries a lot of weight. Within the dialogue of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, of the many fictitious cities of the world, his commentary on language, culture, life, death, and so much more. As soon as I started listening, I immediately wanted an animated series based on the book, its cities and its conversations.
Narrator does an excellent job. I can't wait to dive into it again.

Imagination and transitions

Reading this book feels like tapestry woven with dreamy imagined cities with each chapter transitioning flawlessly into each reflections of human experience, memory and imagination. Mesmerizing is the word that comes to my mind

Such a wonderful book ruined by terrible narration

I've read this book numerous times because it's one of my favorites. I thought I'd like to listen to it, but the narration is completely unsuited to this book. First, the narration has a weird cadence. The narrator stresses words in such a way that you think a sentence is finished, but then he picks it up again and you realize the sentence hasn't ended. It's as if the narrator isn't really paying attention to the story, and it's distracting. He also reads too quickly for such a meditative book, again, maybe because he isn't familiar with the book and just recorded this on his first take. Jeremy Irons or Sally Scott, among others, would have been so much better.