Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #172932 in Books
• Published on: 1997-10-02
• Original language: Italian
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Gore Vidal
'...fantastic webs of prose to which all things adhere'

New Yorker
'...a shamelessly original work of art…beautiful in the sense that it is the careful statement of an artist we have learned to trust'

About the Author
Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923. He grew up in Italy. He was an essayist and journalist and a member of the editorial staff of Einaudi in Turin. In 1973 he won the prestigious Premio Feltrinelli. He died in 1985.

Customer Reviews

A strange, clever masterpiece.
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...

Journey into storytelling
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.

Crossed destinies
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.