9/22/2023 0 Comments Author of invisible cities![]() He went into hiding rather than join the fascist military of Benito Mussolini and later joined the underground resistance in WWII. Italo Calvino born in Cuba but his Italian parents moved back with him when he was 2 years old. The structure of the book in fact, is an integral part of the beauty of its beauty. This I feel is really important because of the way the book was written. A post modern novel with little plot and seemingly a much more poetic dreamlike quality.īut on starting to read and being drawn into the novel I think it becomes apparent why this has become such a touchstone for creative thinking about design and cities and why many architects love it so much, me included.īefore the review I will give some background and have a more detailed look at the structure of the book. It’s a staple for architecture students and architects alike, but why is it so popular and what’s so interesting about it? After all it may not seem on first sight to be particularly relevant to the practice of architecture as although it proports to be about cities it’s actually a magical realist book whose cities are dreamlike creations. In terms of being an investigation of storytelling, Invisible Cities is often compared with stories by Jorge Luis Borges (in particular “The Library of Babel”) and several of Samuel Beckett’s novels, including The Unnamable and Malone Dies.The Book Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino is a classic modernist novel yet has had a widespread popularity that elevates it above most books of its type and has come to have an enduring influence among artists and architects. Constrained writing techniques can include mathematical and cyclical organization of the kind used in Invisible Cities, or, as in Georges Perec’s novel The Void, using a lipogram (not using one particular letter throughout the novel in that case, the letter e). Additionally, Calvino was a member of the Oulipo group of writers, founded in 1960, that focused on writing prose and poetry using systems of constrained writing. Calvino wrote his master’s thesis on Joseph Conrad, who is best known for Heart of Darkness, and though Conrad wrote in an entirely different style than Calvino, both men focus to a degree on exploration of “new” lands and the consequences of such exploration. ![]() Within Invisible Cities, Calvino makes direct references to Thomas More’s Utopia and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, as well as to Guy Debord’s seminal 1967 philosophical work Society of the Spectacle, which critiques modern consumer culture and criticizes modern dependence on images to mediate experiences. Invisible Cities draws on The Travels of Marco Polo, which was recorded late in the 13th century by Rustichello de Pisa from Polo’s recollections of his travels. Calvino died in 1985 of a cerebral hemorrhage. He wrote Invisible Cities during this time. After the death of a close friend and the cultural revolution in France, Calvino went through an “intellectual depression” and joined the Oulipo group of writers. He left the Italian Communist Party after the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1957, and though he retained his belief in communism as a concept, he never joined another party. ![]() ![]() After this, he began to write fantastical novels, all of which were well received. He began publishing novels and stories to great acclaim in the late 1940s, but his realist novels received poor reviews. Following the war, Calvino returned to Turin, completed a master’s thesis on Joseph Conrad, and became active in communist groups and publications. He went into hiding rather than join the military, decided that communists had the most convincing argument, and joined the communist Italian Resistance in 1944. During World War II, Calvino enrolled at the University of Turin and then at the University of Florence in their Agriculture departments, hiding his literary interests. His parents were openly derisive of both religion and the ruling National Fascist Party and as such, they exempted Calvino from religious classes at school. His father spent time in Mexico before moving to Cuba, and his mother gave Calvino his first name to remind him of his Italian heritage-though Calvino’s family moved back to Europe when Calvino was two years old. Calvino was born in 1923 to Italian botanists and agronomists. ![]()
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