"KUBLAI KHAN DOES NOT NECESSARILY BELIEVE EVERYTHING MARCO POLO SAYS…": CALVINO'S INVISIBLE CITIES

CALVINO, Italo. Invisible Cities. New York and London: A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, (1974). Octavo, original half gray cloth, original dust jacket. $1100.

First edition in English of William Weaver's translation of the Italian fantasist's remarkable novel, a dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo describing cities real and imagined.

"In this novel, which established his international reputation, Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan 55 cities he has visited in his travels—all of them, as the title suggests, imaginary. Through this device Calvino meditates on ontological, cosmological, and ethical questions, a common feature of much of his work, but the imaginative detail of the descriptions of the cities is enjoyable for its own sake" (Barron). "His novels and stories and fables were both classically modernist and giddily postmodern, embracing both experiment and tradition, at once conceptual and humane, intimate and mythic… His prose was ambassadorial, his work a living bridge between Pliny the Elder, Franz Kafka and Italian neorealist cinema" (Jonathan Lethem, in The New York Times). Translator William Weaver "translated dozens of books, a dozen by Calvino alone, including Invisible Cities, which posits descriptive and philosophical conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, and a collection of short stories, Cosmicomics, for which Mr. Weaver won a National Book Award for translation in 1969" (The New York Times). The first edition was published in Italy as Le Città Invisibili in 1972; this is the first edition in English. Barron, Fantasy and Horror 7-63.

Book in fine condition, in a very nearly fine dust jacket with faint traces of rubbing and one crease to front flap.