Customer Reviews

Castle of Crossed Destinies

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Of the four books I have read by Calvino(all to be highly recommended for anyone who does not wish to be allowed to read passively, and who also is looking for something that will "delight in the re-reading", as well as the surprise in the new), "Castle" most adopts a particular structure to present a tale of shifting identities, as do his other novels. Knowledge of the Canterbury Tales is helpful, but Calvino makes sure it sits in the background and does not dominate his readings. I use "readings", if you must know, because this is the strucutre of the novel-a series of tarot card readings of a group of travelers who stop in this castle. The stories are wonderful, in the proud Italian tradition of Boccacio, Petrarch, and Chauser(who learned all he could fropm his Italian masters), and his modern master Borges, and the framing device, is interesting and used subtly and skillfully. If you don't have questions about the nature of narratives and fictions, and about the way those answers implicate how a human subject understands reality or comes to it, "Castle" may not be for you, as you may get bogged down in it's introverted labyrinthine reflections. If Borges' metaphysical fariy tales are your cup of tea, it here runneth over.

Italo Calvino's an author I've enjoyed for years, devouring his strange narratives. Reading The Castle of Crossed Destinies for the first time I feel like someone's torn the carpet from under my feet: I'm disappointed. Yes, it's "ingenious", as a back cover excerpt from a New Yorker review states, but it's not gripping or enthralling or a good read. The genius of this book lies in its structure, in the way it's been created. This is a book of stories interpreted or laid over patterns found in tarot cards placed on a table in criss-crossing patterns. Stories read horisontally and vertically like words in crossword puzzle.

As concept art or an experiment in narrativity this is ingenious. I love it. But it's not just concept art. (Ah, and I realise that "just" is dodgy. I'm not quite sure where it might lead.) This is a book. Books are meant to be read. This ingenious structure results in dull, uninspired stories. I'm exhausted after two: I've seen the structure (concept, gimmick) and I'm sated.

The concept is cool but then what? Is a gimmick enough? I suppose that depends on what you want. I mostly want more.

Italo Calvino was a master of surreal storytelling -- he was, for example, one of only two authors I've seen who could manage a second-person narrative. But his gimmick falls flat in "The Castle of Crossed Destinies," a book that is intriguingly laid out, but never manages to be more than a curiosity.

In the first section, a traveler comes to a castle full of other guests, but for some reason no one there is able to speak. To tell each other about their histories, they use a pack of tarot cards to communicate their stories -- tales about love affairs, ancient cities, and Faustian pacts.

The second is pretty much the same, except that it takes place in a tavern, where mute people are still using tarot cards to describe their pasts. The stories -- evil queens, fallen warriors, even an Arthurian tale -- get darker and stranger, especially when the narrator himself began to describe his own past to the people who are watching him and the cards.

As an idea, tarot cards being used to tell a story is brilliant. Especially since the stories that Calvino spins out are not necessarily the only interpretation -- each card used to tell the story can be interpreted differently. The problem is, in the first half of the book, Calvino tries to apply this to some very boring, straightforward little stories. They tend to stop suddenly, without much of a finale.

The second half of the book uses this gimmick more skilfully, with Calvino writing in greater detail, and using more ornate, atmospheric writing. It feels less like stories wrapped around some cards, and more like stories with cards as illustrations of what might have been. He also adds a more eerie, macabre tale to this half, making it even more engaging.

The first half sags in a big way; it's almost tiring to read. But the second half of "Castle of Crossed Destinies" is where Calvino's tarot gimmick starts to pay off. Interesting, but not all that it could have been.

Just as the tarot card reading unfolds in the story, this book has innumerable levels that beg for thought and interpretation: it is part historical novel, part fortune-telling, and part a history of the great classics of western civilization. It is also a fascinating experiment in expanding the literary vehicle, adding the dimension of the cards - functioning as kind of symbolic building blocks as well as a springboard for association - that creates a parallel narrative to the gorgeous descriptive power of the work. Calvino, I feel, has created a work as complex and rich as the best of Nabokov. As with all truly great novels, there is a great deal left unsaid, that the reader can mull over if she so chooses. While the vocabulary was very difficult for my primitive Italian, it was as beautifully written as Calvino's other work.

Warmly recommended.

Calvino is one of the most creative writers I've ever had the pleasure of reading. The concept alone of this book is jaw-dropping in its possibilities--a group of strangers come together and tell their adventures through tarot cards. Each tarot combination is illustrated and interpreted by the narrator with ties to several mythological tales. It is all extremely subjective and extremely ambitious.

All of that aside, the concept proved to be more than Calvino could adeptly handle. (He admitted to never being completely satisfied with the book and finally published it as a way to put it to rest) However, I don't think I've ever read another author who could have handled the subject matter better than Calvino. All in all, I would only recommend this to Calvino's most devoted admirers.

One of the above mentioned reviewers thought the execution to be vague in its style and not the work of indepth thought, perhaps though it takes a certain degree of ingenious to see such possibilities from a pack of tarot cards, to me it sounded like he spent some time figuring out how to best execute it from the after note and in particular its final comment on how he wishes each time he sits down to write a book to be writing as if for the first time sums up Calvino as a writer, his approaches are constantly varied and always breath-takingly original. As I have found European writers in particular are able to take novels to another level of experience, manipulate the form to create something original and classic. The novel reads like a classic and seems timeless in its setting and execution and follows a Canterbury Tales theme, there are occasionally hints here and there that it is a modern writer, in one tale the mention of technology like computers seemed out of place and alerts you to the fact that is recent. To best read this you need plenty of time to enjoy it, the steam of conscious style demands your attention as do the tales, some original, some based on classical legends. A well worthwhile read

I'm a beginner at reading Italian literature, but there's a few amusing things Calvino did here...he took pivotal scenes from classic literature that includes the poetic epic Orlando in Love and characters of Shakesphere, works of Renaissance literature, and rematched them to the minature art of the time, tarocchi game cards.
I recognize excerpts of human passions from the poetry epic of Orlando in Love from Matteo Maria Boiardo, the Ferarra count, poet and storyteller for the D'Estes clan in the 1470s in the Castle of Crossed Destinies. Calvino also took parts of the Arthurian romantic tales that Boiardo, Aristo and other courtly poets and 'rematched' them to the trump and other cards of the classic Italian tarocchi. I say rematched, as Boiardo and other poets/artists of D'Estes family members did allegorical praising in their poems or paintings that included direct or thinly disguised praises to their patrons. The patrons appear as romantic heroes amid Greco-Roman, Arthurian or other mythic landscapes. The D'Estes and Visconti-Sforzas were related through marriages and both sets of families have historical tarocchi card sets---but it is the "completed" set from the Milanese Visconti-Sforzas that we are familiar with now.
I thought that I recognized a few of the fictional scenes that Calvino presented from Renaissance sources.

I really can not say that I enjoyed The Castle of Crossed Destinies but the structure of the narrative is very interesting and is in some ways a commentary on all narration and also on the underlying archetypes of narration. Thus for readers of fiction, this short book, a collection of stories, offers food for thought about how a story is created or re-created as the case may be. The book is written in two sections. In both, a traveler comes to a castle or tavern where no one can speak and each person at the table tells their story or tale using the Tarot cards. There are many stories related here but the curiosity is that one person's series of cards can then be criss-crossed with another traveler's cards to form a grid which can be read backward and forward, up and down. Thus the elements of the narrative can be used and reused in creating narration in an infinite number of patterns with the cards having different meanings depending on the sequence in which they are read. This strongly hints at the psychology of Carl Jung and the universal archetypes that play a role in each person's psychological makeup. However a story requires that the actors show action and thus the series of cards in and of themselves do not relate very much action, which must be interpreted by the mute teller to the listeners. The randomness of this is certainly a protection against cliché but some of the stories generated with this methodology left me a bit unsatisfied. There are many magical characters and yet the stories, for all their strangeness, seemed to end up abruptly. Throughout the book are illustrations of the cards mentioned on that particular page, a nice touch. Also at then end of the book is a diagram mapping Calvino's interpretation of Shakespeare's great tragedies. In summary, this book appears to be an experiment with narration which is very interesting as a concept but the stories left me a bit cold.

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 two-volume novel The Orphan's Tales (The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden & The Orphan's Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice); enough, in fact, that I wonder if she was inspired by this work. Neither novel is quite a novel, per se, but more a collection of folk tales (or short stories in the form of folk tales) wound around each other through a magical framing device; but while many readers would probably enjoy the books more by reading them that way, they ARE more than the sum of their parts. Both site themselves within and comment on the greater body of world mythology; in both the narrator is just as much a character to figure out as any of the people he/she is discussing, and it is the narrator's story that is the heart of the book.

Calvino's book is not perfect; the first section, in the castle, is quite a bit more polished and satisfying as a puzzle than the second half in the tavern. The stories in the first half fit together organically, each leading into the next one and fitting together with all the others that came before in the crossword puzzle effect mentioned in the description; in the second half Calvino could not bring order to the chaos of cards, and while he made that chaos part of the novel's structure it still failed to satisfy. But despite (or possibly because of) its failings it is splendid. Glorious even. Pure, inventive literary fun.

Efficiently written, very good prose, but can be dry. The book is short so that shouldn't damper any efforts to read. The book, as the title suggests, is about a place where the many characters in the book get together and tell each other their stories. The castle itself is the place where these destinies cross, in the form of stories told by each character via tarot deck. The means of intersection between each story is allegoric to events in everyday life, each card having multiple meanings to different characters and stories.

The stories themselves are at turns interesting and complicated, sometimes dull and obscure.

The Castle of Crossed Destinies is a book that has many strengths and even more layers to it, and would make for strong rereading material (hopefully getting better then), but be forewarned that one should be ready to interpret a grapeshot of heavily themed stories, virtually without rest. Do not read when tired.