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plasticrocket's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
3.5
Definitely extremely dated, but I mean... it is from the 13th century. This gave me some very interesting insight into the state of the world during that time, but I don't think that any translation is going to fix the repetitiveness of the writing.
bookbelle5_17's review against another edition
This was repetitive and boring. The prologue was a bit more intriguing where we learn about Marco Polo's father and uncle.
benji_44's review against another edition
adventurous
informative
mysterious
medium-paced
theesotericcamel's review against another edition
4.0
The legend goes that the book was first conceived in Genoa, where Marco Polo happened to share a prison cell with romance writer Rustichello Da Pisa. Intrigued by Marco Polo's stories about his travels to the Orient, they both saw a potentially lucrative chance to collect these into a book. In his prologue, Rustichello Da Pisa describes Marco Polo as "the most well-travelled man of this age," and this is perhaps not as much of an exaggeration as it sounds. For Indeed, Polo's service for Kubilai Khan, the Emperor of Cathay (North China) at the time, took Polo and his family ever deeper into the East. Perhaps the first travelogue to achieve literary fame, and all this before printed materials were widely available, it dates back to the 13th century. Keeping this in mind, Marco Polo is revealed to be a very tolerant man, and also a very observant one. The particular translation I read endevoured to keep the chattiness of the original prose. So stories are punctuated with "What more is there to say?" and "Why make a long story of it?" along with other casual formulas of speech. Keep in mind that this is a travelogue from a merchant's perspective, so there are a lot of descriptions products special to the area, and the route of travel. But these are frequently augmented with anecdotes and stories from that area too, and it is these that provide the colour to the book. While in Persia for example, Marco Polo tells us of a popular story of an old man with a fortress in a mountain, and his teams of assassins. Some of you probably recognize this story as being about Hassan I Sabbah. I do not think this story's infamy originated with this book, but it is still interesting to learn how captivating the story it was even way back then. Some of these stories and observations sound fantastical, and it becomes evident that Marco Polo is telling this stories second hand from other sources without saying so. But the majority of it seems truthful enough. Marco Polo was a very lucky guy to have seen and done as much as he had in his day and age. And as it goes with any travelogue written from any age, I frequently felt as if I was traveling alongside as part of the retinue. The real world was and still is full of wonderous adventures after all.