From the Bookshelf of On Paths Unknown…

The Castle of Crossed Destinies

Italo Calvino

Start date: September 10, 2016

Discussion: POSTMODERNISM ITALIAN STYLE

Why we're reading this: We return to the postmodern with Italo Calvino, this time in fairy-tale/Chaucerian vein, with flavorings …more
[close] We return to the postmodern with Italo Calvino, this time in fairy-tale/Chaucerian vein, with flavorings of the tarot.

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POSTMODERNISM ITALIAN STYLE

* Calvino: The Castle of Crossed Destinies: Thread 1. The Tale of the Ingrate and His Punishment
By Amy (Other Am… · 24 posts · 29 views

last updated Jan 19, 2016 03:40AM

The Castle of Crossed Destinies. [ENDING SPOILERS]
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last updated Feb 02, 2016 02:51PM

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What Members Thought

Sep 17, 2016 Michael Finocchiaro rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction, italian-20th-c, novels

I am a huge Calvino fan. His stories are full of mathematical marvels and ingenious ideas. The Castle of Crossed Destinies has both of these characteristics and is a short but marvelous read.

47 likes · Like · see review

Jul 04, 2015 Amy (Other Amy) rated it did not like it

Shelves: in-translation, the-world-adores-and-i-do-not, reviewed, 1001-boxall, the-magic-and-the-real, 1001-done, 1-star-do-not-read-this, with-pictures, words-on-words, books-on-books

I publish this book to be free of it: it has obsessed me for years. I began by trying to line up the tarots at random, to see if I could read the story in them. "The Waverer's Tale" emerged; I started writing it down; I looked for other combinations of the same cards; I realized the tarots were a machine for constructing stories; I thought of a book, and I imagined its frame: the mute narrators, the forest, the inn; I was tempted by the diabolical idea of conjuring up all the stories that could I publish this book to be free of it: it has obsessed me for years. I began by trying to line up the tarots at random, to see if I could read the story in them. "The Waverer's Tale" emerged; I started writing it down; I looked for other combinations of the same cards; I realized the tarots were a machine for constructing stories; I thought of a book, and I imagined its frame: the mute narrators, the forest, the inn; I was tempted by the diabolical idea of conjuring up all the stories that could be contained in a tarot deck.

description

The Hanged Man and The Magician from the Bembo Tarot used for The Castle

Aren't those interesting? Those are the cards used for the first section of this book. Yet here I am, handing a nice, shining single star to Italo Calvino. What the hell happened there?

Really, this should have worked for me. I love symbolic, self-referential books on books. I love the idea of Tarot as a story machine, of the search for an All-Story. This even has a fantastic The Wasteland reference! And ends by making Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, and King Leer into the same story! So what gives?

Mainly, what gives is that this particular experiment in fiction failed. In seeking to tell the stories of the mute narrators and keep his self imposed rules, Calvino ends up with the narrator within the story interpreting the cards for the reader as they are laid down. This ends with a lot of 'he must mean,' and 'surely what happened was' going on. He is also using the minor arcana, which makes the story visually boring. As cards are reused, the story becomes confused and even more visually boring. The first part, the castle, is unmitigated crap, largely because the rules of that section require the cards to be reused in the order they are laid on the table when tales intersect. After a while, even Calvino is just glossing.

The tavern stories in the second part are considerably better, as Calvino allows his characters to grab cards from each other. He seems to have put more heart into this section. His usual sly remarks and cheerful asides are much more prominent here. He goes into an extended meditation on writing when he tells his own tale. But there are none of the wry revelations that I found so charming in If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, and this book does nothing that that book did not do better.

Final verdict: It's more crap than not. Skip it. Maybe it would be best if authors didn't publish works just to be free of them themselves. (Here, have a nice picture of a Tarot card used in the second part of the book. Call it a consolation prize.)

description

The Magician from the Marseilles Tarot used for The Tavern ...more

14 likes · Like · see review

Mar 14, 2013 Rand rated it liked it

Shelves: lost, shorts, travel, fun-with-form

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

7 likes · Like · see review

Jun 09, 2010 Nate D rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: italy, read-in-2010, 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

2 likes · Like · see review

Jan 11, 2017 Flora rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories, fairy-tales-folklore

I think I like Calvino's ideas more than I like his writing.

I love this idea, though: using tarot cards to create stories, creating a pattern with the cards so that all the stories interconnect. I kind of want to try this with my own deck: what stories could The Wild Unknown come up with? ...more

1 like · Like · see review