Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A strange, clever masterpiece., 2 May 2001
By A Customer
In The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Calvino has attempted to blur the distinction between word and image. The setting is a castle that is also a tavern, hidden somewhere deep in the midst of a thick forest. Lost travellers who seek refuge there discover that the forest has robbed them of the power of speech. Seated around a table on which lies a pack of tarot cards, the travellers realise that they can use the pictures on them to relate their adventures. What follows is a complex and clever intertwining of a score of stories, each story overlapping with others, forming a mesh of cards that can be read in a myriad ways. It was Calvino's absurd intention to conjure up all the stories that could be contained in a tarot deck; a "diabolical idea" that obsessed him for years. He spent whole weeks re-arranging cards into ever more elaborate patterns, some of them taking on a third dimension, growing into cubes and polyhedrons, to the extent that (as he later confessed) he became completely lost in them. Within the random sequences of cards, he recognised various well-known tales and legends: the stories of Faust, Hamlet, Oedipus, Parsifal, De Sade's Justine. In the first part of the book, it is the tales of 'Roland Crazed with Love' and 'Astolpho on the Moon', both taken from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, that form the central axes of the grid upon which all the other stories depend. When read backward, each tale is transformed into something new. For instance, the tale of 'Astolpho' becomes that of 'Helen Of Troy' and the tale of the 'Ingrate' becomes that of the 'Man Who Slew Death'. The new tales that Calvino penned to complete the mosaic share insights with the older fables. Morbid elements abound, partly due to the fact that the key cards in the tales are often the violent ones of the Major Arcana -- Death, the Devil, the Tower of Destruction, the Hanged Man. Although the symbols remain the same, it is the context of a card among its fellows that makes each interpretation unique. When the Graverobber places the Ten Of Cups next to the Last Judgement it is to indicate that he had ascended to a great height and was viewing the cemetery (with its cup-like urns) from above, whereas in another tale the same card could indicate a feast or an alchemist's apparatus. The second part of the book is even more complex than the first. Here, the castle that is also a tavern has become a tavern that is also a castle, and the guests seated at the table in front of the tarot pack have grown impatient. Rather than waiting for each traveller to recount a tale one at a time, the guests attempt to tell all of them simultaneously. The result is a disconcertingly abstract tangram, a jumble of images that attempts to impose form on chaos and ends with the homogenised form of chaos itself. As for the substance of the actual stories, The Tavern of Crossed Destinies shows greater depth than its predecessor. The themes are always fantastic, sometimes horrific, even surreal. There are vampires, ghosts, demons, battles with magical armies and duels with mystic warriors, earthquakes, plagues, trips to the moon, odd sexual encounters, pacts with the devil, zombies, cities in the sky, robots and parallel dimensions. In one tale, women take revenge on men, slaughtering or castrating them before taking over the world. The narrator of this debatable nightmare is told that "no man is spared... only a few, chosen as drones for the hive, are granted a reprieve, but they can expect even more atrocious tortures to quell any desire of boasting." Calvino's dry wit and penchant for the ironic should preclude any hint of insanity on his part, but there is no denying that this is a neurotic book. The first part, The Castle, was originally published in 1969; the second part, The Tavern, followed in 1973. As if realising the dangers that lay ahead, Calvino abandoned his scheme for a third part, The Motel of Crossed Destinies. Instead, he turned to completing his strangest book, Invisible Cities, which was simply an attempt to describe every facet of every imaginary city while in reality only describing one. It is yet to be determined whether Calvino is still the only author willing to write books which, by all the laws of fiction, should not exist...
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
My head hurts. In a nice way., 23 Jun 2004
A palimpsest, no more. A traveller wanders into a castle and finds that, like all the other guests, he has lost the power of speech. At the end of the dinner given by the lord of the castle, a tarot set appears on the table and the various guests use the cards and their depictions to tell their story. Arranging them in different ways, above or below each other, to the left or to the right, the travellers all tell stories straight from the middle age novels of Tristan and Isolde and others. Full of colour, of demons, sorcerers, kings and queens, princesses, nights errant, the devil and days of judgement, the few pages of this novella conjure up a wealth of stories rich in narrative.
None of the travellers is exactly what he seems and none of the stories are exactly what they seem either. For the depictions on the tarot cards are quite vague and, as ever, open to interpretation. We cannot know whether or not our author is correct in his interpretation of the stories he sees unfold before his eyes; does he get mere details wrong or is he mistaken about the entirety of the story?
More than a mere succession of short stories, Calvino has allowed his love of the sets of tarot cards he has encountered to provide him with the platform to explore, on a small scale, the art of story telling, the importance of narrators and the use the author makes of them as filters through which to observe the action. At times, the cards needed by a narrator to tell his story are not available - they have been taken by another; at others, the same card represents a different character from the time it was used before. All is mixed; cards and characters are interchangeable; the tarot set has become the canvas of the world; all the world's a stage and the cards can be used to tell any story, all our stories
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Journey into storytelling, 12 Oct 2004
Chances are, you won't have read anything like this before. A disparate group of travellers take refuge for the night in a castle - whereupon they find themselves unable to speak. Intent, nonetheless, on finding some means of communicating with each other, they begin to experiment with a set of tarot cards. Each character takes it in turn to tell the story of how they reached the castle, laying out each in turn, using the images within the cards to represent the stages of their journey.What unfolds is a dazzling exploration of myth and fairytale, using the archetypes and symbolism of the cards (each of which is displayed in the margin of the page when invoked). Lines of cards - stories - intersect and overlap as more are laid down on the table. In doing so, they echo, contradict, deepen, and borrow from each other as the overall layout grows, adding whole new stories - and ways of reading the existing stories - just from the way they sit beside each other, and what different cards mean in relation to others. Again, the full layout is displayed in the book, once all the tales have been told. Sometimes the characters in the cards and the stories they tell are archetypes: the Bride, the Warrior, the Alchemist. Sometimes they're literary, or mythological: Oedipus, Mephistopheles, Roland. There are layers upon fascinating layers of symbolism and meaning, here - you could, frankly, go on reading and re-reading this book for months, and not see all it has to offer. Wonderful.
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