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Italo Calvino's ‘Invisible Cities' is a book which has no plot as such -- no beginning, no development of characters -- but it does have a sad, bittersweet ending.
It is a collection of
one page descriptions of the cities
that Marco Polo visited on his long travels, interspersed with a succession of dialogues between Kublai Khan, the oriental emperor and Marco Polo who describes fantastic and often magical cities, charactericized by a unique quality or concept.
The novel shines magnificently as a study and examination of our strange relationship with memory. As Polo tells Khan, "It is not the voice that tells the story, but the ear." As Calvino also notes, the best way to really maintain and preserve our memories is to leave them be. Only in this way can we avoid the temptation of returning to them and likely distorting and warping them from their original state.
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