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. ( )

Ah, to be drunk with a pack of tarot cards.

Or was it speed? Not sure. It could be PCP. But whatever the drug, this collection of short stories surrounding the obvious use of tarot cards to write stories or re-write common tales or to lay down the structure of alchemy or to just have a plain ole good time is a concept I can love in pure concept terms, and do, but just how much did I love this exact work?

Um. Well. Some parts were fun and funny and the deep story concepts were really rather cool, but getting deep into any of it except for the stories we already know by heart was a real pain. I kinda felt like we were playing with little green interchangeable army men one moment and then we were having an intellectual discussion about high alchemical concepts and symbolism and the structure of the soul versus the medium in which we use it and its inversion, as seen with Doctor Faustus. (As in creating philosopher's gold within one's soul as the medium versus using the soul as a coin to create philosopher's gold directly, with the obvious fail associated with it.)

Of course, if that's too complicated to enjoy, then I'd recommend avoiding this book because that was just a tiny, tiny part. The rest seems to be a random shuffle and subsequent interpretation.

Fun, in a way, but oddly dissatisfying. ( )