This is an imaginary conversation between the Italian explorer Marco Polo and the great emperor, Kublai Khan. Polo is describing imaginary cities. I thought it quite bizarre and have a hard time believing that it was nominated for the Nebula Award for Science Fiction in 1975. It did make me want to learn more about Marco Polo (I bet most young people today just think of Marco Polo as a video messaging app.)
James Mustich put it on his list. So I obeyed and read it. Let's see what James has to say about this book:
As light as a cloud and just as beautiful, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities floats across the mind’s sky and seduces our vision. Purporting to be a record of conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, in which the inveterate traveler describes the many extraordinary cities he has encountered in his wanderings, it is in fact a fiction of poetic and philosophical charm that unfolds in brief descriptions of fifty-five fantastic places, from Anastasia, “a city with concentric canals watering it and kites flying over it,” to Zenobia, which, “though set on dry terrain . . . stands on high pilings, and the houses are of bamboo and zinc, with many platforms and balconies placed on stilts at various heights.” To read Invisible Cities is to discover an unsuspected mythology whose truths are inexplicably recognizable; it is unlike nearly every other book you will ever open. A true master of the fabulous, Calvino succeeds by making his readers feel they are as imaginative as he is.
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