The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount

While this is amusing and clever ( a non-existent, "perfect" knight), the narration is rather choppy and doesn't flow well at all. There's quite a few places with absolutely wonderful phrasing, but there's even more with incredibly awkward word choices that just make me cringe to read them. I think the translator may be trying to word for word translate the book, but it just doesn't flow as well in English as it does in Italian. I thought the same about The Baron in the Trees, and I just checked - it's the same translator.

Other than that, the Nonexistent Knight is a fun parody of medieval knight poetry, and the Cloven Viscount is just as funny. ( )

Good! Very satirical and sarcastic. Very descriptive and imaginative. Told from the perspective of Bradamante, a warrior woman in love with the nonexistent knight, who joins a convent in between adventures. The nonexistent knight is the perfect knight, and so can't exist. In the end, when his belief in himself is destroyed, he ceases to exist. ( )

Calvino's Cavaliere inesistente and Visconte dimezzato are both parts of his trilogy "Our Ancestors" (along with Barone rampante). These three works are, in my opinion, his most "modern" works. They deal with fantastical characters that are thrust into reality and shows the ways that they become part of society. In the case of the knight, who is a 'perfect' knight who lacks only the body inside his armor, this turns out to be impossible, since his existence is predicated on something that is not true. The same impossibility of existence happens with the viscount, who was split into two perfect halves, each of which can exist on its own and each representing a different fracture of the same man. The two men are faced with the dilemma of existence: they cannot continue to exist in their current condition, and their attempts to deal with the dilemma represent the modern condition. The books are both really fun and enjoyable and I would definitely recommend them! ( )

These shorter works lack the conceptual heft and emotional maturity of _If on a winter's night a traveller_, but are entertaining and quirky, and reward the time spent reading well.

A couple of fun stories, and Calvino's a brilliant writer. At different moments it reminds me of The Brothers Grimm, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jorge Luis Borges. ( )