Las ciudades invisibles

Marco Polo, back from the East, sits in the garden of the Emperor Kublai Khan and describes the cities he has seen, each with a woman's name: Isidora, Zaira, Zenobia, Fedora. Kublai Khan, who rules a vast empire he cannot see for himself, listens and tries to decide whether the stories are true. Italo Calvino groups the descriptions into themes such as memory, desire, signs, and trading, and each short chapter is a small prose poem about how we build places. In the end, Marco hints that every city he has described is really Venice.

It suits readers who like short, dreamlike books that are more about ideas than plot. It can be read in any order, one city at a time.

Deep, contemplative, open-ended and thought-provoking; a moderate read.

Best for readers like The Literary Connoisseur. Which reader are you?