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Magical Realism
Fiction
Italian Literature

Books like The Castle of Crossed Destinies

The Castle of Crossed Destinies

1997Italo Calvino

4.5/5

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. Calvino would hardly be Calvino if he didn't give the project his own twist, complicating matters to the point of impossibility. His protagonists, including the narrator, discover that they are mute. How are you to share if you can't speak? They let Tarot cards speak. 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. Is that possible?Even Leonardo da Vinci needed words and writing to make the statement that he thought painting was a superior art form compared to literature. Since Antiquity, visual art and literature have been compared and evaluated according to their respective expressive power. 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.Different stories are interlinked, and give the cards new potential for interpretation. Literature jumps in to fill the gaps in the visual narratives. We meet Faust, King Lear, Macbeth, Oedipus and many others while the narrator tries to find his own story in the cards.Literature like painting? Lessing, in his Laokoon, defined literature as a sequence of episodes and painting as one important moment in focus, and in a way, Calvino has managed to merge these two ideas into a sequence of defining moments minus the connecting tissue of narrative context.This is quite the opposite of what Hofmann did in his literary description of Brueghel's The Parable Of The Blind, turning the description of the painting into a long episode - connecting the brush strokes by adding interpretation and meaning.Why would Calvino do a thing like that? Is there any meaning in his ambiguous mutation of the functionality of art and literature?I would say let the tarot cards speak. The Hanged Man says:"Lasciatemi così. Ho fatto tutto il giro e ho capito. Il mondo si legge all'incontrario. Tutto è chiaro."The world clearly makes more sense if it is read from the upside down position. I agree, Calvino! Bravo!

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