Access Today Il Castello Dei Destini Incrociati Penned By Italo Calvino Compiled As EText

be my friend here in Goodreads, my question is: "What is your favorite literary genre" In response to that, I received several answers ranging from classics, noir, thrillers very few, mystery and suspense and romance every now and then but mostly YA and "none in particular" or as "I read anything" that sometimes makes me ask myself what's the use of asking the question.
Well, I now havefriends and more than half of those I guess wanted me to be their friend instead of the other way around.


But there was one answer I will always remember: "I read everything including tarot cards!"

Come on, you can't be real, I said to myself.
I readily accepted his offer of friendship, You see, I normally click on Compare Books and check on the person's profile first if not set on private before I accept.
But I never had a friend, GR or nonGR, who knows how to read tarot cards,

The tarot cards, considered as prophetic to some and are themselves open to many symbolic interpretations, are used by Calvino author of the essay Why Read the Classics to tell different stories, based on real life or imagined by himself.
What he did was: he laid down all thetarot cards and composed short independent stories either based on existing ones like those of Roland, St.
George, St. Jerome, Faust, Oedipus and Hamlet or from his imagination like the story of an alchemist who sold his soul, The book is divided into two parts:The Castle of Crossed Destinies, published in, that used The Viscondi Pack andThe Tavern of Crossed Destinies that featured The Tarot of Marseilles.
Each book follows the same plot, The characters find themselves in a castle Bookor tavern Bookunable to talk or dumb after a long journey in the forest.
Then sitting on the dinner table, they tell their stories by opening and laying down their own series of cards, The "crossed" destinies happen when the stories share a common tarot card which can be interpreted differently, Very clever storytelling. It is reason enough for this to be included in theYou Must Read Before You Die, I supposed that this kind of storytelling is something that only a gifted novelist can do,

Fabulist Italo Calvinowas an Italian journalist and writer of short stories, essays and novels, In one of his earlier essays, he said that the qualities of literature that future generations should cherish include: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity.
All of these qualities are in this book especially visibility because all the tarot cards appear alongside the narratives, For somebody like me who are not familiar, I think I have not hold a deck in all my life, with tarot cards, I was able to follow the stories.


That tarotreader guy is now one of my close friends here in Goodreads, He even told me that he will read my future using his tarot cards, Well, without consulting any of his card, I can already predict one: that he sure will be clicking "Yes" for this review, See I do not need any tarot card to tell what will happen,
L'unico punto fermo in questo va e vieni di pensieri è che può fare a meno sia dell'una che dell'altra, perché ogni scelta ha un rovescio cioè una rinuncia, e così non c'è differenza tra l'atto di scegliere e l'atto di rinunciare.
I am a huge Calvino fan, His stories are full of mathematical marvels and ingenious ideas, The Castle of Crossed Destinies has both of these characteristics and is a short but marvelous read, I always feel the need to alternate one type of writing with another, completely different, to begin writing again as if I had never written anything before.


And thus ends Italo Calvinos The Castle of Crossed Destinies, There are times when I forget just how much I love Calvinos writing, This is a very short book, but one that requires intense concentration to read in fact, it requires intense concentration right up until the point where you realise that you simply arent smart enough to get this book in its full and breathtaking complexity.
That moment for me was pagein the Picador version that I own at least, that is the moment I truly knew that there are depths to this book I have no hope of ever being able to plumb.
Not unlike trying to read Kants various categories in the Critique and also finding myself lost in a mind infinitely more logical than mine can ever hope to be I read this book with mouthgaping awe.
As TS Eliot put it, il miglior fabbro the better craftsman,

Now that Ive probably put you off reading this book, let me see if I can make you want to read it.


A man is lost in the forest after a long, dangerous and arduous journey, In the distance, as it is getting dark, he sees a castle, He makes his way there and is shown into a room where a great number of other people are already seated and eating and drinking.
He joins them and is about to begin talking when he discovers that he has no power of speech at all.
This surprises him, but in watching the others at the table he soon discovers that they too have lost the ability to speak.


When the food and wine are cleared away all that is left on the table is a pack of tarot cards.
One of the guests flips through the pack and then selects cards with careful deliberation and sets them down in two rows.
These cards and the manner in which they are placed on the table tell his story, Another guest then begins his story, also by laying down cards on the table this time crossing the two rows with two columns.
In this way elements of the first story are reused in the second story, In the end there is an enormous spread of cards across the table in which twelve interlaced stories are told, The stories can be read up and down, or down and up, or right to left, or left to right,

Tarot cards have a symbolic meaning, obviously enough, but that meaning depends in these stories on the cards position it appears within the story itself and on the story that is being told as much as on the image depicted on the face of the card.
So that the two of clubs a card with two wooden clubs crossed on its face, can mean two paths intersecting or it can mean the beginning of a battle.


This is a book that does what poetry does it weaves meaning out of images while at the same time referring to the history of poetry or literature as a way to give those images additional context and content.
I dont know how familiar you might be with TS Eliots The Waste Land but basically, it does much the same thing, taking lots of lines from European poetry and literature and smashing them so as to play with the shattered pieces scattered across the floor.
In that poem there is a fortuneteller with a wicked pack of cards called Madame Sosostris, It would be hard to be too surprised that she might make an appearance in this book as well,

My Good Reads friend Paul did this review of this book sitelink goodreads. com/review/show/ . And while I can understand his frustration, this book is much better than he might make you think, I do understand that someone might think it is all a huge wank or a drunken bet gone horribly wrong but I can only accept that until you get to I Also Try to Tell My Tale from that moment on this book becomes something completely different from what you might have imagined it was going to be.
I wouldnt mind betting if I was a betting man that Paul stopped out of frustration before this part of the book on the basis that he had worked out where this one was going

From then on until the very last breath of this book it becomes something else something that justifies any incomprehension or difficulty that might have troubled you up until this point.
Lets be completely frank here if you are not about to pull your hair out by the time you get to this point in the book you have completely missed the point of the book and need to cut back on the drugs you are taking they are, quite obviously, not doing you any favours at all.


But from the moment the King of Clubs from the Ancien Tarot de Marseille is dropped onto the table you will find it virtually impossible to stop reading.
The descriptions of St Jerome and St George which has you saying oh so that is what that stuff meant and then the three tales of madness where Hamlet, MacBeth and King Lear are smashed together are so mindblowingly well written and so damn clever and so insightful that it makes you come away thinking you have at least a vague idea of why people waste quite so much time reading this Literature rubbish in the first place.


You know, you really could see this book as some sort of postmodern wank of metafiction, the sort of book one might read at University for fortyfive years followed by a PhD thesis explaining the connections between the Oedipus myth and the sorts of fairytales that Calvino himself documents in his Italian Folk Tales and, of course, the everpresent and potent images found in the humble tarot pack.
BUT this is a book based on the real obsession of the author, a writer who decided one day to see if he could make patterns out of rows of tarot cards so as to literally use them to tell stories and to then see if he could link those stories together and also somehow write them up in a way that complemented the sting of images he had produced on the table before him.
As he said, he finally published the book in the hope of exorcising this obsession which was becoming allconsuming, Again, Im not a betting man, but I would put real money on my belief that publishing the book really didnt help

And for those of us who have spent a lifetime obsessed with choices:

every choice has its obverse, that is to say a renunciation, and so there is no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing.


I would also be prepared to bet that Calvino liked to read Hegel, You know, perhaps Im more of a gambler than I like to pretend,
Since high school, I have been in love with the premise of The Castle of Crossed Destinies: people get lost in the woods, lose their ability to speak, find themselves

in a castle and tell each other their lives' stories through tarot cards.
Calvino's creativity is, as always, very inspiring to me, and it makes me crave to write something, anything,

These short stories are fablelike, quite dark too, and they reminded me of the Middle Ages: think of Boccaccio's Decameron, Ariosto's L'Orlando Furioso or evens Occitan poetry and courtly love Raimbaut d'Aurenga, Bernart de Ventadorn, Chrétien de Troyes etc.
. I was fascinated with them and they reminded me of my favourite tales as a child but, ultimately, I got tired of them.
They are quite short but, to me, some could have been cut out, .