Read-read, September 2011 :: Well, my Other Reader just tore through this little masterpiece and reminded me of how thoroughly perfect it was. And so, despite a sack of new library books to peruse, I will temporarily lay aside the Thrill of Beginning a New Novel and instead spend a couple days basking once again in this splendid construction of highly active design and imagination. 
 I think it is safe to say that this has moved out of the pile of 
 -Books I Have Read and Loved 
 veered wide of 
 -Books I Am Glad to Have Read So That I Need Not Read Them Again 
 and found itself in 
 -Books I Can't Wait to Revisit 
 and quite possibly 
 -Books I'm Happy to Re-Read Anytime 
 I still prefer not to say much of anything that might compromise the strange and surprising allure of Calvino's most ambitious novel. Suffice to say that this was engineered -- but also crafted, philosophized, and perhaps dreamed -- into existence at the height of Calvino's involvement with that Oulipo and I'm only partly aware of the formalist designs and constraints that inform it as a result. At the same time, delighting in artifice as this is, Calvino is far too agile a storyteller to let it become the kind of mechanized doorstop of dry overcleverness: instead this exudes wonder, mystery, romance, intrigue, insight, perhaps the mysteries of the universe in scale model -- all the things that thrill us at the brush of a new story. 
 ... 
 Old review, circa May 2009: I think everyone went a little crazy in the 1970s. In the 60s, books like Slaughterhouse Five, Pale Fire, and Giles Goat-Boy had blown the doors of literature open to a whole new era of innovation, and we ended up with Gravity's Rainbow, much of Donald Barthelme's Sixty Stories, and beautifully bizarre Calvino work like Invisible Cities and this. I can't even tell you what it's about, lest I spoil some of the story's measured disorientation, but rest assured that it is very worth the visit.