Recommendations from our site
“This is one of my favorite books ever. I’m tempted to give a lot of theory-based background to it – where it fits in the postmodern oeuvre and all that – but honestly it doesn’t even need to fit within a framework…This book is a travelogue of imagined cities that its protagonist, Marco Polo, has visited. If you read it straight through, it just seems like the author has come up with fifty-five really wacky and fantastical ideas for cities. Upon the second or third reading, you get the sense that it’s following a pattern, that the themes and the elements involved in these cities are following some kind of internal logic.” Read more...
Arianna Reiche, Novelist
“Well, officially it’s Marco Polo describing the cities of his travels to Kublai Khan. It’s been opined that every city he describes is a version of Venice, but I think that doesn’t really work. They seem to me to be marvellous imaginative fantasies, which sometimes reproduce states of mind. There are 40 or so cities described, all entirely imaginary I think, and that’s what’s so magical about them. But there are passages that are suggestive of something, and nearly always of the way memory works. It’s a very hard book to describe, because the cities are never just a description of a place. They all mirror states of mind and being……..I chose it for its sheer imaginative quality. I loved it almost as an extension of the travel book in the mind – the travel book that has no responsibility to where it has been because it hasn’t been anywhere real, it’s been in the realm of ideas and images.” Read more...
Colin Thubron, Travel Writer
“The set-up is that Kublai Khan has conquered this vast empire; an empire so large that he, sitting at the centre of it, cannot know all the many parts of it. He can’t visit them, he can’t see them, and if he goes to one part all the other parts have changed. So he sits there at the centre of his empire and Marco Polo travels around and visits the various cities and comes back and describes them to Kublai Khan.” Read more...
The best books on The Death of Empires
James Meek, Novelist
