The Castle of Crossed Destinies

by Italo Calvino

Book Overview

A series of short, fantastic narratives inspired by fifteenth-century tarot cards and their archetypical images. Full-color and black-and-white reproductions of tarot cards. Translated by William Weaver.A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156154552
• ISBN13: 9780156154550
• Release Date: April 1979
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Dense with meaning & well written

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.

Amusing for more than a few reasons...

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.

An excellent example of story telling using tarot cards

As a tarot cards reader, I really loved this book.The book contain two similar stories - a group of people meet in an isolated place, and having lost the ability to speak, tell their stories using tarot cards.I've found the stories interesting as examples of story telling with tarot cards, though going through the idea a second time in the second story didn't make as interesting a reading as the first story.Regretably, the Hebrew translation contains poor reproductions of the decks with which the stories are told, which is doubly sad considering how beutiful the Visconti-Sforza deck is. As the first edition went out of print, I hope an improved second edition will be printed soon...

Response to criticisms

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

Shifting identities

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.