Ut pictura poesis, claimed Horace in his Ars Poetica, but is it really true? Calvino seems to agree with the idea in the beginning, but his stories crumble and disappear in the artistic arrangements he is imagining while looking at the multiple meanings each card contains.ĭifferent stories are interlinked, and give the cards new potential for interpretation. Since Antiquity, visual art and literature have been compared and evaluated according to their respective expressive power. Is that possible?Įven Leonardo da Vinci needed words and writing to make the statement that he thought painting was a superior art form compared to literature. In sequence after sequence, the cards are arranged to tell the stories of the characters, showing their passions,their hopes, their dreams and their losses.
How are you to share if you can't speak? They let Tarot cards speak. His protagonists, including the narrator, discover that they are mute. Calvino would hardly be Calvino if he didn't give the project his own twist, complicating matters to the point of impossibility. Imagine Calvino setting out to create a Boccaccio or Dante situation, a setting in which travellers meet in an obscure forest and have time to spend on a storytelling adventure. How are you to share if you can't speak? They let Ta Is a picture worth a thousand words? I’m not glad that I’m read it, but I’m not annoyed, either.Is a picture worth a thousand words? And if so, does it tell a story? Imagine Calvino setting out to create a Boccaccio or Dante situation, a setting in which travellers meet in an obscure forest and have time to spend on a storytelling adventure. I didn’t hate it the way I hated Invisible Cities, but I didn’t like it nearly as much as If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Putting that disappointment aside, I have to admit I didn’t really enjoy The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, only with Tarot instead of I Ching and without the alternate history elements. This isn’t what I was expecting or hoping for I went in expecting something like Philip K.
Some of them are original some of them (if I understand Calvino’s epilogue properly) are myths and legends that he “retold” through a given sequence of Tarot cards. There is no overarching plot or action instead, it is a collection of fables and short stories. The Castle of Crossed Destinies is a contemporary version of something like The Decameron. The answer is “somewhere in the middle,” so now I don’t know if Calvino is an author I hate, love, or am just apathetic about. I hated Invisible Cities but loved If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, so I wondered where on the spectrum this third book would fall. The second reason was my troubled relationship with Calvino. First, the Tarot deck conceit seemed like it would be relevant for a current writing project of mine and I wanted to see how Calvino handled it. In-depth thoughts: I picked The Castle of Crossed Destinies up for two reasons. Recommended audience: Those interested in modernist literature those interested in Tarot cards fans of Italo Calvino. Plot summary: Weary travelers at a castle and a tavern are rendered unable to speak, and so use a Tarot deck to share their stories. The next one was The Castle of Crossed Destinies, which I started on the plane to Copenhagen and finished in the Hideout Cafe in Austin while I waited to meet my host and his girlfriend. American English, Italian Chocolate was the first book I knocked off my TBR pile.
I always get more reading done during vacations than any other time of the year.