Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino
· 1 h 04 min · S13 E4
Episode Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino’s novella Invisible Cities is a hypnagogic reimagining of Marco Polo’s time in the court of Kublai Khan. Polo describes 55 impossible places – cities made of plumbing, free-floating, overwhelmed by rubbish, buried underground – that reveal something true about every city. Marina and Anna Della read Invisible Cities alongside the Travels of Marco Polo, and explore how both blur the lines between reality and fantasy, storyteller and audience. They discuss the connections between Calvino’s love of fairytales and his anti-fascist politics, and why he saw the fantastic as a mode of truth-telling.
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https://lrb.me/travel26pod
Further reading in the LRB:
Salman Rushdie: Calvino
https://lrb.me/ffcalvino1
James Butler: Infinite Artichoke
https://lrb.me/ffcalvino2
Jonathan Coe: Calvinoism
https://lrb.me/ffcalvino3
Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.
Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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