Italian Calvino

Is this guy supposed to be good? Reading pic related. I could do better.

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-tips fedora-

Good luck with that, troll.

that's one of the best books i've read, mindblown tier shit

Not trolling guys. His vignettes are extremely short and have the visyal appeal of a Tom Ford film or a watch commercial. But there is very little meaning on the bone.

I don't know why this is considered his best work. I thought it was nothing remarkable desu. Thoroughly enjoyed most of his work though, specially Under the Jaguar sun, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller and his collection of Italian folk tales

>I don't know why this is considered his best work
it's not, it's just the most popular one cause pseuds like to jerk themselves over >dude weed lmao

troll or pleb? u decide

Op again. To put it in perspective I've spent much of the day reading Borges' Labyrinths. THAT is storytelling with a magical paintbrush. Calvino seems lazy and half-hearted in comparison.

>reading books for "stoytelling"

haha this could be an authentic pleb

I mean I'm not retarded like and understand it's intended as a collection of prose poems.

I think the "meaning" is not extracted individually but one has to follow the thread keeping them all together to extract the hollistic idea of city. The structure is interesting, but my issue with the book is that the stories are not very good prose poems and that the allegories are most of the time heavy handed.

fuck okay you guys made me get up off the comfy reading cushion and go to PC. 5/10 I'm taking the bait.

Calvino's flash fiction dealies as told in Invisible Cities are fascinating little jewels. They present an interesting idea regarding a fictional city and/or the people living there. Some facet of the culture or geography that allows fantasy -- but only for a few paragraphs at most.

My gripe is Calvino doesn't do anything with these ideas. They're thrown away as soon as he presents them, then it's on to the next. As an author he had the potential to turn any one of these scenes into a captivating story that makes you think about man and the evils of existence. Instead he's satisfied to end the sketch and leave the reader philosophically unfulfilled. There are no questions posed. No mystery, no greater insight into a fictional world that reflects our own back at us. It's pseudo-literary popcorn. He is saying nothing.

>Italian

it's not about cities, holy shit, it's about the relationship between language and reality, and possibly empire

>i want everything spoonfed to me
>i read for ideology

go back to r/books

>As an author he had the potential to turn any one of these scenes into a captivating story that makes you think about man and the evils of existence.
>man and the evils of existence.

uh wat? what the fuck? lol

amazingly adept at missing the point of the book

>i approve of bad poetry for mad cred on indonesian sarong BBSes
>lmao ideology. patricians hate thinking and reading, it's all about shock value because the real has lost its currency.

please stay a shut-in on Veeky Forums

>lmao ideology. patricians hate thinking and reading

im not the one who read invisible cities and thought it was about "an interesting idea regarding a fictional city and/or the people living there. Some facet of the culture or geography that allows fantasy"

you're referring to the cute dialectic between khan and calvino's self insertion? the genius of the book submerged in Miracle Whip (TM)-like prose?

>you're referring to the cute dialectic between khan and calvino's self insertion?

no but the fact that this is what you presume says a lot about your complete lack of critical faculties

i don't give a fuck about prose, especially in translations

i don't give a fuck about calvino's supposed brilliance when i could read bachelard say the same shit without the stupid, simple, self-congratulatory ornament.

>it's not about cities
I may have completely missed the point then, but how is a book that contains 55 descriptions of fictional cities NOT about cities.

this is what happens when illiterates try to read literature that doesnt beat you over the head with the "point"

well yeah i mean the "topic" is "cities" i guess, but just reading it as some Dungeons & Dragons "Cities Of The Forgotten Realms" compendium is severely selling it short

that's it, Veeky Forums. i'm burning this dumb calvino book. i can't stand to read it anymore, and it's all your fault.

were you also disappointed when you read to kill a mockingbird and didn't learn how to trap, capture, kill, skin, and prepare a mockingbird?

it would be completely forgivable if the actual poetry wasn't worthless or the pretend-philosophizing in the poetry so unoriginal AND ALSO masturbatory

I have said that I enjoy most of Calvino's work but didn't like this one. I admitted it is possible that this is because I have missed the point. Of course I'm not reading it literally and understand that the poems have allegorical value.
Now could you please explain what I ought to look for, or what is it that makes it so great?

short as it is i was actually unable to finish for comparable reasons. and i loved cosmicomics, baron in the trees, and if on a winter's night a traveler

just see I think the brevity of Invisible Cities belies the density of content here. For me, the easiest way to understand Invisible Cities comes exactly at the mid-point of the novel, in the dialogue between Marco Polo and Kubla Khan where Marco Polo states that all the cities he is talking about is actually Venice. You can note that the work is symmetric, since the first and last chapters have 10 sections, and all the other ones have five, and this structure naturally lends to examining the center point.

Now, you can interpret what Marco Polo said about Venice literally, but he also states that he is using Venice as a lens to distinguish the characteristics of other cities – a compare and contrast in a sense.

Beyond the symmetrical in the 10 – 5 … 5 – 10 structure, there is also a “spiral” in the way he labels the sections. It’s hard to describe in words, but if you think of each named section (memory, desire, etc.) as a point on a wheel, the story progresses from the first spoke to the last spoke along the circle, though with structured shifts backwards and forwards.
Yet another structure is the linked chart, another version can be seen here - complit.illinois.edu/242/Calvino_2_files/an elaborately conceived formal structure.png, where the book is organized in layers.

I think the key here is that you can read the book both linearly or otherwise, organized perhaps by section (i.e. read all the memory chapters, then all the desire chapters, etc.), forwards or backwards (Diomira-Isidora-Zaira-Zora-Maurilia or reversed, Maurilia-Zora-Zaira-Isidora-Diomira). For the layered chart,you can see how you can read the book horizontally or vertically, forwards or backwards.

The way the book is structured simultaneously gives you the freedom to read it differently – in multiple ways that’s not just traditional linearity, but also in a sense restricts you to the possibilities yielded by the formal structure. Various cities (forgive I don’t remember which ones) have inhabitants who are in some ways freed and/or enslaved by connections, whether they be physical or abstract. There is also a city who is described as a spider web, which I think it’s a fairly explicit rendering of the way these connections both free and trap us, not unlike society/life/the human condition/insert generic motif here.

All of this leads to the structure of the book as a way to highlight the relationship between the universal and the specific. These descriptions are ostensibly of Venice, a single city, but Venice is used as a way to examine all other cities, and by extension, humanity. The individual parables are abstractions of a component of human life, ranging from the mundane to the extraordinary. I guess a straightforward way to interpret the labels is that each examines a single idea and how it affects humanity. Human experience is simultaneously singular and distinct, with all of us living experiencing the same world, but differently, similar to how different readers, or even the same reader, can read the same text in very different ways.

How many cities was that again?

Yeah, wikipedia has a neat orthograph of the city-chapters and their examined properties. Rather looks like a barber pole. The canal markers in Venice. Yuk, yuk, yuk, Calvino, very clever. Except none of these invisible cities were worth reading about and the real Venice smells like shit. Calvino's fancy pattern was not worth the time spent in observation.

this may sound pleb but listen to the audiobook of it, it's only 3 hours so it's the same length as a long movie, but there is a great reading of it by John Lee, might make you appreciate it in a different way...there's this part with khan were marco polo is like "what if all these servants and workers only exist when we think of them? and khan replies: to be honest, i never think them..." also worth noting all the cities are named after the wives of emperors of constantinople, what this means, not sure, but every thing is there for a reason

wikipedia is stupid, he's not describing venice, the point when he says "i have been describing the same city every time" is not that he was literally describing the same city but just different aspects of it, which seems possible at first, but false over on closer examination, but that when you describe a city, you describe it by it's differences and similarities with the city you know most well, your home city, so this is part of the unspoken/unwritten things that happen under language...

female principle. kali: destroyer and mother. kingship as marriage to the land, as in the song of songs. it was a tired trope. nowadays its a dead horse.

how is he saying kingship is marriage to the land when the emperor of all these cities needs a storyteller to describe his own empire to himself? just go get an education and read it again

can't spell kublai khan without
>K-U-H-K

marco polo is the young explorer who reacquaints khan with his estranged empire.

plz get off Veeky Forums and go back to drivers ed

i have lived in the nyc metro for half my life, if i were to describe 50 cities, but never mention my link to nyc, you could still infer that i come from a huge American city based on the way i describe all those cities, created a sort of inverse image of my "normative" city, it's how in any "discourse" there is a sort of unspoken base, like orientalists writing about asia, always from the perspective of the west with the orient as "other"

>All of this leads to the structure of the book as a way to highlight the relationship between the universal and the specific. These descriptions are ostensibly of Venice, a single city, but Venice is used as a way to examine all other cities, and by extension, humanity.
That's what I got from it, and what I tried to explain in >one has to follow the thread keeping them all together to extract the hollistic idea of city

I said that the structure was the only part that I found interesting aswell, which is what the analysis you pasted seems to focus on.

>There is also a city who is described as a spider web, which I think it’s a fairly explicit rendering of the way these connections both free and trap us, not unlike society/life/the human condition/insert generic motif here.
Funny it mentions that because that is what I was thinking about when I said the metaphors are heavy handed. Comparing the relations in society to a spider web seems neither insightful nor innovative to me.

>The individual parables are abstractions of a component of human life, ranging from the mundane to the extraordinary. I guess a straightforward way to interpret the labels is that each examines a single idea and how it affects humanity. Human experience is simultaneously singular and distinct, with all of us living experiencing the same world, but differently, similar to how different readers, or even the same reader, can read the same text in very different ways.
That's an interesting perspective I guess, and I admit it did not ocurr to me.

Honestly I doubt I will ever read this again but I agree that there is something great I may be missing. The book certainly lend itself to a lot of interpretations since every city can be a parable or a metaphor. I did not find them very good from a poetic standpoint, nor got much from the allegories themselves. This may say more about me as a reader than about Calvino, and therefore I'm not judging anyone that holds this book in high esteem. But at the same time I will mantain my opinion that this is not Calvino's masterpiece.

op again. I think the dichotomy I'm seeing in this thread is there are some people who take pleasure in being Officially Correct And Therefore Smart, even if it means the tedium of unscrambling meaning from an author's contrived obfuscations.

The other set of people (myself included) would rather be entertained by genuinely novel ideas and have no patience for Calvino's technique. As said before, I don't think there's anything in Invisible Cities that hasn't been said by Bachelard or some other postmodern fart.

Don't let Invisible Cities put you off from Calvino's other stuff.because he has some great short stories and novellas. He was quite prolific and wrote in many different styles, Invisible Cities is not representative of his whole work at all

i didn't suffer any "tedium of unscrambling meaning from an author's contrived obfuscations", i just read it, first pulled in by the comfy descriptions of cities but as i start to see the patterns emerging and realize where he's going with my mind start to expand until somewhere i hit full mindblown, it was greatly enjoyable from first to last page. tedium is slogging through some longwinded 19th century doorstopper that just comes down to be some eventless tale of social climbing and rich people problems "oh the injustice of being a wealthy women in 19th century london, its just not fair", yeah i need 800 pages of that, but but the characters or so real, their whining is truly authentic!

ok italo, that's enough now.

i have if on a winter's night a traveler. haven't bothered with it yet because i haven't been able to finish invisible cities.

>ITT: a genre fiction pleb reads literature in hope to find some escapist drivel and gets confused when he doesn't

>ITT: posers pretending OP's pic related has merit, esp. "lolomg mindblown" merit.

Kys my dude

I knew clicking on this thread was going to piss me off, and it didn't disappoint.
You seem like the type of person that hates poetry and loves engineering. Take your fetishistic focus on the 'message' and go read some didactic political novel like Orwell

An audiobook of Invisible cities sounds wholly repellent. I couldn't bear to listen to these passages and not be able to reread individual lines and images

Im from Dallas, traveled the world several times, and I have never compared a city to it, except Berlin, since both have ugly AF architecture

>ITT: You have to like what I like