Le città invisibili

Argh, can't rate this, because I'm unsure of myself today - did I not get it because it used a lot of big Italian words (I already knew I don't read so good in italiano, but a lot of this felt like it sailed right over la mia testa)? Or because I NEVER get Italo Calvino, in any language (and feel mildly irritated by him to boot)? Or was it a Tao of Pooh poetickal-formatting-does-not-translate-to-audiobook problem?

WHO KNOWS.

The premise is great: young Venetian adventurer Marco Polo recounts a variety of real and imagined cities to the great and aging Kublai Khan via - I'M GUESSING HERE - a bunch of strangely-formatted prose-ish poems. The cities are VERY MEANINGFUL and tediously symbolic. Sometimes they are fun and imaginative. Sometimes they are about our future, and society, and not sucking. LA is briefly bashed (unsurprisingly).

The city tales also follow a meticulous and mathematical meta-structure because MODERNISM!

Ugh. This is like the nth Italo Calvino book I read and don't understand and am generally irritated by. Welp.