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The Castle of Crossed Destinies

3.58 of 5 stars 3.58 · rating details · 1,973 ratings · 146 reviews

A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their stories. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal and chaotic history of all human consciousness.

Paperback, 144 pages

Published October 2nd 1997 by Vintage Classics (first published 1973)

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Feb 07, 2011 K.D. Oliveros rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to K.D. by: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006-2010)

Shelves: 1001-core

To be my friend here in Goodreads, my question is: "What is your favorite literary genre?" In response to that, I received several answers ranging from classics, noir, thrillers (very few), mystery and suspense and romance (every now and then) but mostly YA and "none in particular" or as "I read anything" (that sometimes makes me ask myself what's the use of asking the question). Well, I now have 200+ friends and more than half of those I guess wanted me to be their friend instead of the other w...more To be my friend here in Goodreads, my question is: "What is your favorite literary genre?" In response to that, I received several answers ranging from classics, noir, thrillers (very few), mystery and suspense and romance (every now and then) but mostly YA and "none in particular" or as "I read anything" (that sometimes makes me ask myself what's the use of asking the question). Well, I now have 200+ friends and more than half of those I guess wanted me to be their friend instead of the other way around.

But there was one answer I will always remember: "I read everything including tarot cards!"

Come on, you can't be real, I said to myself. I readily accepted his offer of friendship. You see, I normally click on Compare Books and check on the person's profile first (if not set on private) before I accept. But I never had a friend, GR or non-GR, who knows how to read tarot cards.

The tarot cards, considered as prophetic to some and are themselves open to many symbolic interpretations, are used by Calvino (author of the essay Why Read the Classics) to tell different stories, based on real life or imagined by himself. What he did was: he laid down all the 78 tarot cards and composed short independent stories either based on existing ones like those of Roland, St. George, St. Jerome, Faust, Oedipus and Hamlet or from his imagination like the story of an alchemist who sold his soul. The book is divided into two parts: (1) The Castle of Crossed Destinies, published in 1969, that used The Viscondi Pack and (2) The Tavern of Crossed Destinies that featured The Tarot of Marseilles. Each book follows the same plot. The characters find themselves in a castle (Book 1) or tavern (Book 2) unable to talk or dumb after a long journey in the forest. Then sitting on the dinner table, they tell their stories by opening and laying down their own series of cards. The "crossed" destinies happen when the stories share a common tarot card which can be interpreted differently. Very clever storytelling. It is reason enough for this to be included in the 1001 You Must Read Before You Die. I supposed that this kind of storytelling is something that only a gifted novelist can do.

Fabulist Italo Calvino (1923-1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories, essays and novels. In one of his earlier essays, he said that the qualities of literature that future generations should cherish include: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity. All of these qualities are in this book especially visibility because all the tarot cards appear alongside the narratives. For somebody like me who are not familiar, I think I have not hold a deck in all my life, with tarot cards, I was able to follow the stories.

That tarot-reader guy is now one of my close friends here in Goodreads. He even told me that he will read my future using his tarot cards. Well, without consulting any of his card. I can already predict one: that he sure will be clicking "Yes" for this review. See? I do not need any tarot card to tell what will happen.
(less)

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Mar 19, 2013 Rob Adey rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I was probably supposed to read this, or books like it, when I was
studying English, but I was scared off by the rays of post-structuralist
zeal shooting out of the eyes of my theory-crazed lecturers,
deconstructing everything in their path.

But there's nothing scary here - at least, semiotically speaking. The
central conceit is a twist on Doctor Terror's House of Horror - a
traveller escapes from a wild wood into a castle, eager to share his
story with the other travellers feasting there. But he and t...more

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Mar 16, 2010 Paul rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels

People sit around in pubs and get drunk and bandy ridiculous ideas about - hey, what if you wrote a novel but you couldn't use one letter of the alphabet! Wow, great idea. Hey what about a bunch of characters who can only communicate by means of tarot cards? Whoah, that's cool. Hey - what about someone getting in the next round? Well, we've been part of those evenings, and the next day we've got a fat headache and forgotten all that nonsense. Except for Italo Calvino and Georges Perec. They don'...more

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May 07, 2013 Bjorn rated it 3 of 5 stars

The weirdest - and, sadly, least enjoyable - Calvino book I've read so far, which is saying something.

The whole thing is built around tarot cards. A group of travellers in a deep forest settle down around a table, and since they're mute, they try to tell their stories by showing the others tarot cards in specific sequences - call it a deckamerone of cards. It's a semiotic novel like Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana to the 3rd degree; every story told, while on some level an obvious play...more

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Mar 14, 2013 Rand rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Astrid

Recommended to Rand by: Fate

Shelves: lost, fun-with-form, travel

This book is 144 pages. It is a book, translated from the Italian. The stories are based upon the Tarot. The Tarot is based upon life. Life is based upon stories.

If you are reading this far through all of the reviews for The Castle of Crossed Destinies, none of this is news to you. This off-site review includes images of the Visconti deck which Calvino used.

This review is number 141. Once three more reviews are added, there will be one review for every page in the book. After that direct corres...more

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Dec 18, 2009 Tony rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-short-stories

Calvino, Italo. THE CASTLE OF CROSSED DESTINIES. (1976, 1977). ***. Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923, but was raised in Italy for most of his life. He died in Siena at the age of sixty-one. He is known as an experimental novelist or, even, a fabulist. He did not shrink back from experimentation in his works. This work is actually a combination of two efforts that had been previously published under different titles. Both of the works are based on the use of Tarot cards to form – or illustrate –...more

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Jul 24, 2009 Trevor rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: literature

‘I always feel the need to alternate one type of writing with another, completely different, to begin writing again as if I had never written anything before.’

And thus ends Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies. There are times when I forget just how much I love Calvino’s writing. This is a very short book, but one that requires intense concentration to read – in fact, it requires intense concentration right up until the point where you realise that you simply aren’t smart enough to ge...more

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May 27, 2009 Dev Null rated it 1 of 5 stars

An intriguing idea; telling stories based on draws of tarot cards. But they're simple stories - 4-5 pages each - so its not much of a feat to wrap one around a draw of the cards, especially given the amazingly generous interpretations of the cards we get here. What does make it clever is the fact that Calvino crosses the paths of the different stories, using the same cards in a matrix, and drawing all the possible paths through it... which I thought was quite cool.

But then he gives up on the ide...more

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Aug 11, 2011 Katie rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The notes at the end were more illuminating to me than the text itself. They revealed that this book was written after Calvino spent time playing around with tarot cards, creating stories based upon different arrangements. Sounds like a good way to pass the time on a rainy summer evening, but when one tries to tie these exercises together into a larger narrative structure, it feels weak and contrived. Early in one story, the narrator remarks that assuming a character means the Sun card to indica...more

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Apr 23, 2012 Amanda rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I cannot recommend this book enough to anyone who enjoys the strange and uncanny. Travelers, after traversing a forest, arrive at a castle – or tavern in the second half - unable to speak. Their only means of communication is through a deck of tarot cards – the configurations each traveler lays out their cards in being interpreted by the narrator to tell the stories of each traveler to the reader. That premise alone is the sort of thing I dreamed of someone doing before I knew about this book, m...more I cannot recommend this book enough to anyone who enjoys the strange and uncanny. Travelers, after traversing a forest, arrive at a castle – or tavern in the second half - unable to speak. Their only means of communication is through a deck of tarot cards – the configurations each traveler lays out their cards in being interpreted by the narrator to tell the stories of each traveler to the reader. That premise alone is the sort of thing I dreamed of someone doing before I knew about this book, making it a near mythic tale in and of itself. Though, it’s also what that premise means that makes this as engaging as it is.
All communication is symbolic. What the cards symbolize to the travelers, what the narrator sees in the cards and conveys to the reader and even what the reader takes from the narrator’s interpretation will all be different as everyone interprets every symbol differently. Sometimes slightly, sometimes so vastly as to give the symbol a wholly disparate meaning to another traveler, narrator, reader. There are layers of meaning and no single perspective which can contain absolute truth. The stories told through the cards then become questionable, the narrator unreliable, everything uncertain.
This is precisely what makes the book such an incredible read – the unknowable nature of it all. Why can they not speak in that place, why is it tarot cards through which they must impart their stories, why this narrator, why that interpretation of the cards? There’s a sense of the chaotic throughout due to this. All is liminal, neither here nor there, identities are confused and altered, what is happening and what will happen is occluded. The castle, the tavern, exist outside of an established order and so too the travelers [if this involved performance I’d not shut up for another thousand words, at least - although, it is a kind of performance...].
Like much of Calvino’s work, Castle… is steeped in folklore and myth, as well as referencing some classic works of literature. It’s an unusual, atmospheric book and having read it years ago on a road trip - one of my favorite betwixt and between experiences - it certainly served to provide a sense of eeriness to the whole journey. It’s the sort of book you will be very glad to have read for the doing of it as much for the way it causes you to question the concreteness of meaning and how your subtly different perception can vastly alter your understanding.(less)

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Jul 15, 2012 Tim Pendry rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: cultural-studies, esoteric, literature-general, modern-european, twentieth-century

This may be a very clever book but, I am afraid, it is unutterably dull. There are some brief moments of fine writing in the second half but even these falter - the Tale of the Vampire's Kingdom takes off only to crash and burn into incomprehensibility.

There are two quite interesting half-essays on art and how Calvino came to write the book, one embedded in the 'Tavern' section and the other as postscript, but these are articles for a literary magazine and scarcely justify the effort of ploughi...more

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Nov 09, 2010 Phoenixfalls rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy-challenge, fairy-tale, male-author, italy, translated, fantasy, metafiction, quest, storytelling

This is kind of a splendid book. It is demanding; the reader must engage with it, examining each card as it is revealed and disputing its meaning with the narrator. It also helps to be well-versed in folklore and literature, both because recognizing many of the tales makes them more comprehensible and because Calvino's style is a strange, almost challenging mix of archaic and modern literary styles that sits uneasily on genre shelves.

It actually reminds me quite a bit of Catherynne M. Valente's...more

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Mar 01, 2009 Brian rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: weird-fiction

"The Castle of Crossed Destinies" is really two anthologies in one volume. Each anthology finds mute travelers meeting at a castle or tavern and discovering that the only medium available in which to tell their stories is that of the 78 Tarot cards. (Calvino's fascination with nonverbal communication has arrived here from his flirtations with it in Invisible Cities.) Hence we see the stories of Dr. Faust, of Oedipus, of Hamlet, and of several characters of Calvino's own invention, rendered in Ta...more "The Castle of Crossed Destinies" is really two anthologies in one volume. Each anthology finds mute travelers meeting at a castle or tavern and discovering that the only medium available in which to tell their stories is that of the 78 Tarot cards. (Calvino's fascination with nonverbal communication has arrived here from his flirtations with it in Invisible Cities.) Hence we see the stories of Dr. Faust, of Oedipus, of Hamlet, and of several characters of Calvino's own invention, rendered in Tarot cards and pantomime. Both anthologies are more thought experiments than coherent works of literature.

The first anthology is by far the stronger because of the success of its thought experiment. Cards are laid out in lines, horizontal or vertical, that intersect like the warp and woof of cloth, until nearly every card in the deck has been linked into two different stories, its significance different in each. This is no insignificant intellectual achievement -- and if you read this half of the book, you should actually lay out cards from your own Tarot pack as the stories progress so that you can appreciate its magnitude. The stories themselves, though, mostly fail to captivate. Calvino's self-imposed framework hems in his stories; he has structured himself to death.

The second anthology is much like the first, except that the cards' layout has no perceptible pattern or rule. Calvino's narrators plop cards down wherever they please, or gesticulate towards already-laid cards in entirely different parts of the rectangle, in some kind of vain effort to fill the space. The stories are slightly better than those in the first half, but since the central conceit of telling stories with the Tarot is rendered practically irrelevant by all the jumping around -- you can tell any story with the Tarot if you exercise enough license -- it's hard to be too impressed. Add that to how often these stories lose themselves in allusion and (dare I say it?) pretension and you have a weak finish indeed.

Still, some stories do fascinate, and others that are largely unremarkable contain a paragraph or two of brilliance. Overall it was okay, but I was disappointed after being smitten with Calvino's Invisible Cities.(less)

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May 08, 2013 Oneirae rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction-general

"All this is like a dream which the word bears within itself and which, passing through him who writes, is freed and frees him. In writing, what speaks is what is repressed." -Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies

Describing the work of Italo Calvino must be an art in itself and I do not feel up to the task myself. He writes as if writing itself is an artform. In this book he weaves together various tales from tarot cards. One can see the stories intersect, cards with multiple meanings,...more

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Nov 23, 2009 Debbie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, mainstream

This is a book I should have loved. A sort of Canterbury Tales meets tarot cards. There are two almost separate books in this one slim volume. In each, a group of travelers gather in a strange place. None of them knows how they arrived. Each is mute and their hair has gone white. The first group of stories takes place in a castle and the second in a tavern.

In order to explain who they are to each other, every guest uses a deck of tarot cards to explain their story. Lovely idea.

In theory. In prac...more

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Apr 23, 2011 Deborah Biancotti rated it 4 of 5 stars

I loved the concept of this book: travellers, made mute by the trials of their journies tell their stories by using the images of a deck of Tarot cards -- only to discover that their stories are intermingled. Part of the same, overall story, perhaps: the story of humanity.

And I loved Calvino's explanation at the end, of how he wrote the book & how he found himself increasingly obsessed with re-telling the stories, re-interpreting the cards. That obsession -- the energy & madness of obses...more

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Aug 09, 2011 Kingfan30 rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 1001-books

Well a book told through tarot cards was always going to be an interesting one. It is an unusual concept, the fact that no one can talk and the cards tell the story, in theory everyone there would read them differently and maybe that would have made a more interesting read, the same cards read from different perspectives. I am not sure if I would have followed it better if I knew a bit more about tarot cards, I felt sometimes the cards pictured did not always follow the story.

I think the author...more

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Dec 28, 2012 Jess rated it 3 of 5 stars

Telling stories based on tarot cards suits Calvino's writing style very well. I keep coming back to him despite always feeling slightly confounded by his work. Reading this, I got the same feeling I get when I read the tarot: that I can feel the connections on an intuitive level, but I struggle when I attempt to synthesize or verbalize what I am reading into any sort of narrative structure. But then I remember that not all is conscious or logical, that these images can reach us without trying so...more

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Dec 08, 2011 Isabel rated it 4 of 5 stars

In the uncertain light the cards describe a nocturnal landscape, the Cups are arrayed like urns, caskets, graves among the nettles, the Swords have a metallic echo like shovels or spades against the leaden lids, the Clubs are black like crooked crosses, the gold Coins glitter like will-o'-the-wisps. As soon as a cloud discloses the Moon a howling of jackals rises as they scratch furiously at the edges of the graves and fight with scorpions and tarantulas over their putrid feast.

There are two sto...more

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May 13, 2011 Temperamente added it · review of another edition

«Lasciatemi così. Ho fatto tutto il giro e ho capito. Il mondo si legge all’incontrario. Tutto è chiaro.»
È il ’73 quando Calvino pubblica Il castello dei destini incrociati insieme a La taverna dei destini incrociati per Einaudi.
Elabora allora uno schema di base valido per entrambi i testi ossia un «quadrato magico» in cui è possibile leggere in tutte le direzioni da destra a sinistra e dall’alto in basso, o viceversa, le storie che ciascuno dei personaggi racconta. Ops “lascia intendere” dovrei...more

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Nov 27, 2011 Paul rated it 3 of 5 stars

I bought this book in a small Brooklyn bookshop during a rain storm. I was on vacation and felt like a little post-modern fiction. I'm writing this mostly for myself, so sorry if that doesn't add anything to the review. The book itself was exactly what I was looking for: a nerdy delight to make my brain hurt. The fashion in which Calvino weaves his narratives around the formation of tarot cards is masterful. The man is a storyteller by trade and a mathematician at heart. Or the other way around....more

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May 20, 2012 Emanuela rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: narrativa-italiana, fantasy

Ecco, questo sarebbe un libro da tablet che riproducesse le immagini dei tarocchi che Calvino fa giostrare per raccontare le storie di questo bi-romanzo, del castello e della taverna dei destini incrociati.

Geniale nella costruzione geometrica delle storie, raffinatissimo e coltissimo nella scelta dei personaggi che pesca nell'Orlando Furioso, nella mitologia, nelle tragedie di Shakespeare.

Il passaggio che preferisco è: "Anch'io cerco di dire la mia" dove l'autore si lascia condurre dalla success...more

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Feb 09, 2011 Zach rated it 4 of 5 stars

More than this book is enjoyable or entertaining, it reveals the depth of thinking of which Calvino was capable. The stories that make up these two tales are OK, but the concept behind them is staggering in its complexity. I think, if anything, this complexity actually crippled the full potential of the book, which lacks not insight but flow, and I think that was because the narrative was forced into an artificially rigid structure. Still, if there is anyone I'm willing to let "think at me" for...more

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Nov 15, 2010 Scott rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: finished-2010

Very cool book. A group of travelers meets in a castle and are unable to speak. They then proceed to tell their stories using tarot cards instead of words. Calvino does an incredible job of reading and fleshing out whole stories from each selection of cards, as well as allowing for all of the stories to be placed in a huge square, allowing stories to be read forwards or backwards.

Most of these stories are fantastical and intriguing, making this a very hard book to put down at all. The only issue...more

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Jun 22, 2010 Nate D rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: fortune-tellers and mythologers

Recommended to Nate D by: That awesome New Paltz used bookstore

Shelves: italy, oulipo, 70s-delerium

Guests at a castle in the woods, finding themselves unable to speak, tell their stories through a deck of Tarot cards, building an elaborate matrix of their interconnected narratives and suymbologies. Mythic, elegant, and formally inventive, which is to say it's an Italo Calvino novel. Who else would attempt a project like this. In some ways it is more an intriguing project than a necessary one, but many of the individual stories do manage to startle and delight, and The story culminates in kind...more

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Oct 21, 2012 Sandra rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Calvino è geniale. Il commento potrebbe limitarsi a queste parole.
Un tesoro questo piccolo libro, che raccoglie due racconti (o forse potrei dire due romanzi con mille storie dentro), uno quello che dà il titolo al libro, “il castello dei destini incrociati”, l’altro si intitola “la taverna dei destini incrociati”.
Dico subito che mi è piaciuto tantissimo il primo, un po’ meno il secondo.
Ne “il castello dei destini incrociati”, partendo dai Tarocchi del mazzo visconteo, il più antico che si conos...more Calvino è geniale. Il commento potrebbe limitarsi a queste parole.
Un tesoro questo piccolo libro, che raccoglie due racconti (o forse potrei dire due romanzi con mille storie dentro), uno quello che dà il titolo al libro, “il castello dei destini incrociati”, l’altro si intitola “la taverna dei destini incrociati”.
Dico subito che mi è piaciuto tantissimo il primo, un po’ meno il secondo.
Ne “il castello dei destini incrociati”, partendo dai Tarocchi del mazzo visconteo, il più antico che si conosca, un gruppo di commensali capitati per caso in un castello in mezzo a un bosco racconta, senza parlare, solo sfogliando le carte e disponendole sul tavolo, la propria vita, il proprio destino, che si incrocia costantemente con quello degli altri commensali, a causa dell’esiguità del numero di carte del mazzo. Ne “la taverna dei destini incrociati” il mazzo di carte usato è quello popolare dei tarocchi marsigliesi, la struttura è la medesima, cambia l’ubicazione, non più un castello ma una locanda nel bosco.
Ogni carta ha mille volti e mille significati, perché la medesima figura racchiude mille storie: ecco ad esempio che l’Arcano della Temperanza, che rappresenta una donna con delle ampolle sulle braccia, può rappresentare un incontro con una principessa che si è persa nel bosco, come anche un’ostessa o ancella di castello che apparecchia la tavola per i commensali, la quale, prima di arrivare nella taverna o nel castello nel bosco magari era stata sposa felice del Re di Denari, fino a quando non aveva incontrato a corte il Bagatto, altro Arcano, mago alchimista alle prese con i suoi alambicchi, che le fece un incantesimo; il Bagatto, a sua volta, può rappresentare uno scrittore, dal momento che nei tarocchi è raffigurato seduto a un tavolo con una penna d’uccello in mano, ma anche un oste ciarlatano, intessendo così mille storie di uomini e donne diversi. E potrei continuare all’infinito. Ovunque ci sono riferimenti letterari, da Ariosto a Shakespeare, dai tragediografi greci a Goethe. Un po’ come Perec, ne “la vita istruzioni per l’uso”, altro capolavoro cui quest’opera mi ha fatto pensare.
La fantasia e la creatività di Calvino si dimostrano insuperabili, nel castello c’è l’ universo, c’è l’uomo che percorre le strade della vita incontrando pericoli, guerre, amore e follia, in un percorso insidioso e periglioso, al cui termine il significato profondo sta nelle parole di Orlando che ha perso la ragione, rappresentato dall’Arcano dell’Appeso, legato a testa in giù, che dice: “Lasciatemi così. Ho fatto tutto il giro e ho capito. Il mondo si legge all’incontrario. Tutto è chiaro”. (less)

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Jan 20, 2013 Eleclyah rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: autori-italiani, 4-stelle-bellissimi, ebook, commentati

Un'atmosfera a dir poco particolare è quella che Calvino crea in questo libro: un viaggiatore in cerca di un riparo, un castello al cui interno incontra altri viandanti, uomini e donne, sconosciuti, muti.
E un mazzo di tarocchi con cui ognuno di loro racconterà la propria storia, in una concatenazione ingegnosa e intrigante in cui nulla è lasciato al caso.

Le due parti in cui il libro è diviso, "Il castello" e "La taverna", si basano sullo stesso principio appena descritto, ma il modo in cui sono...more

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May 16, 2012 Guido rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: letteratura-italiana

Le carte dei tarocchi combinate per raccontare delle storie. Esperimento narrativo, intreccio di letteratura, matematica ed esoterismo; eppure il vero colpo di genio è all'inizio di ciascuna delle due raccolte che compongono questo volume: nel Castello dei destini incrociati i personaggi sono costretti da un improvviso mutismo collettivo a utilizzare le carte per raccontare le proprie disavventure; nella Taverna dei destini incrociati la loro voce è dominata dal chiasso del locale, e ancora una...more

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Sep 17, 2012 Robin rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Once again, here is a book that I can coldly appreciate is brilliant, but I hold it at arm’s length and cannot like it. It was tiresome. I am tired of thinking about it. So was Calvino, apparently--he writes in the Note at the end: “I publish this book to be free of it: it has obsessed me for years.”

I can see how tantalizing this challenge was that he set himself: to tell stories--original stories, classic stories, and universal stories--through the medium of Tarot cards in such a way that the...more Once again, here is a book that I can coldly appreciate is brilliant, but I hold it at arm’s length and cannot like it. It was tiresome. I am tired of thinking about it. So was Calvino, apparently--he writes in the Note at the end: “I publish this book to be free of it: it has obsessed me for years.”

I can see how tantalizing this challenge was that he set himself: to tell stories--original stories, classic stories, and universal stories--through the medium of Tarot cards in such a way that the stories structurally intertwined according to geometrical rules. For me, Calvino’s angsty rendition of his authoring process in the Note was by far the best part of this book. It lent meaning to much of what had seemed chaotic and strained in the chapters that had come before. Calvino’s own voice when he uses it to speak to his reader directly is mesmerizing enough to echo in my head for days afterwards, so I will always look forward to the moments when he grapples “on screen” with the very idea of storytelling. The chapter “I Also Try to Tell My Tale” is in many ways as frustrating to me as those that came before, but it opens up into a philosophical romp that’s really quite fun to read and let percolate. “Perhaps the moment has come to admit that only tarot number one honestly depicts what I have succeeded in being: a juggler, or conjurer, who arranges on a stand at a fair a certain number of objects and, shifting them, connecting them, interchanging them, achieves a certain number of effects.”

At the end of the day, I still didn’t like the experience of reading 95% of this. I would glaze over after every sentence and skim along without really taking it in, and then occasionally encounter some peculiar and distracting bits of translation that really made me wonder what a phrase was in the Italian. (For instance, William Weaver, the translator--who is apparently the best possible translator for Calvino according to the lady on the 24 bus who tells me she has read all Calvino in both translation and the original Italian--more than once uses the phrase “kick the bucket”--what is the Italian idiom, I wonder?) But then, there is that other 5%...

If I could rate the chapters individually, they would all get one star, except for “I Also Try to Tell My Tale” (4 stars), “Three Tales of Madness and Destruction” (3 stars), and the Note (5 very enthusiastic stars). So, I’m going to say that averages out to a two-star review and leave it at that.(less)

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Mar 16, 2012 Melita rated it 4 of 5 stars

I admit I am prejudicial. I find Italo Calvino's literary works original, creative, and enigmatic; The Castle of Crossed Destinies is all this. Though his characters may be figures from literature and the telling of tales may harken to Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, he's a virtuoso of narratives unprecedented. Tales told by mute strangers through the interpretation of Tarot cards and their placement, the unreliability of interpretation and narrator, the intertwining of individual narra...more

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About Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979).

His style is not easily classified; much of his writing has an air of the fantastic...more

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Quotes from The Castle of Crossed ...

“every choice has its obverse, that is to say a renunciation, and so there is no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing” — 10 people liked it

“From this arid sphere every discourse and every poem sets forth; and every journey
through forests, battles, treasures, banquets, bedchambers, brings us back here, to the center
of an empty horizon.” — 2 people liked it

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