If I was going to continue using my themed reading list, The Castle of Crossed Destinies would force me to ignore Italo Calvino novels when picking A Book From An Author You Love That You Haven't Read Yet. It is the second straight disappointing book of his I've read, after loving If on a winter's night a traveler.

As described in his Note at the end of the book, Calvino created the tales in this book from his own hand-selections from two historically significant decks of Tarot cards, organizing them into two sections. The first section, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, consists of seven tales told by a group of travelers who find themselves unexplainably mute in an ancient castle and can only communicate with each other through gestures and their own hand-selections of Tarot cards. The cards are described and interpreted as they are placed on the table the travelers share (e.g. the King of Coins, the Eight of Cups, Temperance), accompanied by drawings of the actual cards.

The second section, The Tavern of Crossed Destinies, mirrors the first in most respects—unexplainably mute travelers who find themselves thrown together in a strange setting—except that the references to the cards are more generic; for example, the denomination of a card is not provided, only its suit. This section also contains Calvino's metafictional insertion of himself into the book, attempting to tell his own tale through the cards. The titles in the Castle section read like morals to fables or Edgar Allan Poe stories (e.g. "The Tale of the Ingrate and His Punishment" and "The Tale of the Doomed Bride,"), while those in the Tavern section are more cryptic, merely describing what will occur within each (e.g. "The Waverer's Tale").

Perhaps Calvino is just too intellectual for me. He includes a plethora of historical references within the work without elaboration, expecting the reader to be familiar with the workings of Tarot and mythology, amongst other subjects. In the days before the internet, this seems like an unrealistic expectation of all but a select few. In his own tale, he spends an inordinate number of sentences referring to works of art by both well-known and obscure painters, comparing their treatments of various saints (particularly Saint George and Saint Jerome), and provides the galleries in which the paintings hang and occasionally the year of the painting.

As with his novel Invisible Cities, none of Calvino's details motivated me to research his historical references. Even the tales themselves are generally uninteresting. The tale tellers fight over specific cards each needs to relate his or her experience. Calvino seems to have found the infinite interpretations of the cards and their sequencing intriguing; to me, it merely adds to the self-amusing nature of a book I would not recommend. ( )

I enjoyed this more for the original format. It felt like Calvino had more fun writing this than I did reading it. Some of the stories are quite entertaining and original, but the repetition of the cards and sort of rote presentation got a little dull at times. If anything, it inspired me to try out this technique myself and so I have unearthed my lost pack of tarot cards and begun re-examining their pictures to see what sorts of stories I could glean...

I would not recommend this as an introduction to Calvino. Which is one of the great things about him, actually: he changes his style and approach to writing with almost every work. ( )

I enjoyed this more for the original format. It felt like Calvino had more fun writing this than I did reading it. Some of the stories are quite entertaining and original, but the repetition of the cards and sort of rote presentation got a little dull at times. If anything, it inspired me to try out this technique myself and so I have unearthed my lost pack of tarot cards and begun re-examining their pictures to see what sorts of stories I could glean...

I would not recommend this as an introduction to Calvino. Which is one of the great things about him, actually: he changes his style and approach to writing with almost every work. ( )

I publish this book to be free of it: it has obsessed me for years. I began by trying to line up the tarots at random, to see if I could read the story in them. "The Waverer's Tale" emerged; I started writing it down; I looked for other combinations of the same cards; I realized the tarots were a machine for constructing stories; I thought of a book, and I imagined its frame: the mute narrators, the forest, the inn; I was tempted by the diabolical idea of conjuring up all the stories that could be contained in a tarot deck.


The Hanged Man and The Magician from the Bembo Tarot used for The Castle

Aren't those interesting? Those are the cards used for the first section of this book. Yet here I am, handing a nice, shining single star to Italo Calvino. What the hell happened there?

Really, this should have worked for me. I love symbolic, self-referential books on books. I love the idea of Tarot as a story machine, of the search for an All-Story. This even has a fantastic [b:The Wasteland|19697160|The Wasteland|T.S. Eliot|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1387725409s/19697160.jpg|389834] reference! And ends by making Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, and King Leer into the same story! So what gives?

Mainly, what gives is that this particular experiment in fiction failed. In seeking to tell the stories of the mute narrators and keep his self imposed rules, Calvino ends up with the narrator within the story interpreting the cards for the reader as they are laid down. This ends with a lot of 'he must mean,' and 'surely what happened was' going on. He is also using the minor arcana, which makes the story visually boring. As cards are reused, the story becomes confused and even more visually boring. The first part, the castle, is unmitigated crap, largely because the rules of that section require the cards to be reused in the order they are laid on the table when tales intersect. After a while, even Calvino is just glossing.

The tavern stories in the second part are considerably better, as Calvino allows his characters to grab cards from each other. He seems to have put more heart into this section. His usual sly remarks and cheerful asides are much more prominent here. He goes into an extended meditation on writing when he tells his own tale. But there are none of the wry revelations that I found so charming in [b:If on a Winter's Night a Traveller|374233|If on a Winter's Night a Traveller|Italo Calvino|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1355316130s/374233.jpg|1116802], and this book does nothing that that book did not do better.

Final verdict: It's more crap than not. Skip it. Maybe it would be best if authors didn't publish works just to be free of them themselves. (Here, have a nice picture of a Tarot card used in the second part of the book. Call it a consolation prize.)


The Magician from the Marseilles Tarot used for The Tavern ( )

Classic narratives (Orpheus, Shakespeare, etc.) retold by mute travelers through the means of tarot cards.

Unless one has a particularly strong interest in tarot, it's hard to get much from this book. The writing is occasionally interesting by virtue of its quick turns and misdirections, but it doesn't go anywhere especially exciting with it.

The premise would be rendered redundant if any one of the characters knew sign language, or had thought to carry a pencil. ( )