Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Published 1972 · 25,877 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Fantasy, Philosophy

How hard is Invisible Cities to read?

Invisible Cities scores 62 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 50 out of 100
Precise, architectural vocabulary combining the concrete and the fantastical. Calvino's prose in translation retains a lapidary quality that demands close attention to individual words.
Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
Sentences are measured and elegant rather than syntactically difficult. The clarity of each sentence contrasts with the conceptual density of the whole.
Abstraction: 75 out of 100
Each city is an abstraction dressed as description. The philosophical conversations between Polo and Khan operate at a high level of conceptual generality about knowledge, language, and empire.
Information density: 70 out of 100
Every paragraph is compressed to its essentials. There is no filler, no transition, no connective tissue — each city is a self-contained unit of meaning.
Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
There is no conventional narrative. The cities accumulate into meaning through juxtaposition and pattern rather than through plot or character development.
Symbolic density: 80 out of 100
Every city is a symbol. The entire book operates on a symbolic register where architecture stands for consciousness, geography for desire, and cartography for the limits of knowledge.
Ironic distance: 40 out of 100
Calvino maintains a gentle irony through the frame narrative — Polo may be inventing cities, Khan may be imagining the conversation — but the tone is more wistful than satirical.
Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
The book offers no resolution in any conventional sense. The final meditation on the inferno opens rather than closes the text.
Structural complexity: 70 out of 100
Eleven categories of five cities each, with interleaved dialogues. The mathematical structure — a combinatorial grid — is itself a formal argument about the relationship between order and meaning.

How Invisible Cities is regarded

Invisible Cities holds a literary regard score of 88 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where Invisible Cities sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (47 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Invisible Cities scores 88 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.15. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin
Symbol: Anagogic
No one, wise Kublai, knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it.
Mythos: Irony & Satire V (Fatalistic phase) (irony v)
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together.
Genre: Anatomy + Romance
The Great Khan owns an atlas in which are gathered the maps of all the cities

Where the story of Invisible Cities takes place

  • Kublai Khan's court, Yuan China (Kai-ping-fu, Kin-sai), 1271-1292 (1271 to 1292), the main setting
  • The invisible cities: dream-cities of Polo's tales and the Khan's atlas

5 things that are true of Invisible Cities, with the passage for each

  1. Zobeide was founded by men who all dreamed of chasing a naked woman through a city and then built a city to trap her.

    They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked.

  2. Valdrada's two halves, the city and its reflection in the lake, do not love each other.

    The two Valdradas live for each other, their eyes interlocked; but there is no love between them.

  3. Marco Polo admits that every city he has described was a way of speaking about Venice.

    Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.

  4. In Eusapia the inhabitants built an underground copy of their city for their dead.

    the inhabitants have constructed an identical copy of their city, underground.

  5. In Procopia the narrator ends up sharing his inn room with twenty-six smiling strangers.

    There are twenty-six of us lodged in my room

Scenes in Invisible Cities that Frye would name

44 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anatomy, untitled
The Great Khan owns an atlas in which are gathered the maps of all the cities The atlas is an encyclopedic catalogue-device that includes real, vanished and future cities.
Displacement, untitled
the braggart soldier and the parasite coming from a door meet the young wastrel and the prostitute The comic stock-cast of Roman comedy persists as a social routine in Melania.
Anagnorisis, untitled
Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice. The Khan's discovery that all the cities were one implicit city pivots the whole dialogue.
Anagnorisis, untitled
Perhaps Adelma is the city where you arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known. This means I, too, am dead. The narrator recognizes the faces of the dead and then his own position among them.
Anatomy, untitled
The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. A statement of the book's own Menippean principle of cataloguing.
Anatomy, untitled
The Great Khan’s atlas contains also the maps of the promised lands visited in thought but not yet discovered or founded: New Atlantis, Utopia, the City of the Sun A learned catalogue of utopias and dystopias in the manner of an anatomy.

Books that share these scenes with Invisible Cities

About the author

Italo Calvino

Guides that discuss this book