Invisible Cities Audiobook By Italo Calvino cover art

Invisible Cities

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Invisible Cities

By: Italo Calvino
Narrated by: Richard Higgins
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About this listen

“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

©2013 Italo Calvino (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers
Classics Historical Fiction City Fiction
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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

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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.

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3 people found this helpful