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Il Visconte Dimezzato = The Cloven Viscount (I nostri antenati #1), Italo CalvinoThe Cloven Viscount is a fantasy novel, written by Italo Calvino. It was first published by Einaudi (Turin) in 1952 and in English in 1962 by William Collins, with a translation by Archibald Colquhoun. The Viscount Medardo of Terralba and his squire Kurt ride across the plague-ravaged plain of Bohemia en route to join the Christian army in the Turkish wars of the seventeenth century. On the first day of fighting, a
Calvino is slowly becoming one of my all-time favorite authors. Once again I'm bedazzled by his lively humor and imagination. How he weaves the different elements of the story together is just amazing. I feel like a child who has been told a wonderful fairy tale. I won't say too much because this is the kind of story to be discovered on one's own to take full pleasure out of it, not half of it hopefully...
4.5 starsI don't know why I stopped reading Calvino after being completely blown away by Invisible Cities and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler years ago—I think it's about time to mend that oversight. "Thus the days went by, and our sensibilities became numbed, since we felt ourselves lost between an evil and a virtue equally inhuman."While The Cloven Viscount is not as visionary and ambitious as the two other works mentioned, it still has the signature Calvino Fabulist wit all over it. Readin...
This novella is a kind of dark fairy story. The titular viscount is 'cloven' in a very literal sense. He is cut in half. The whole story has a kind of magical vibe, although there is no actual magic. Instead it's filled with perplexing symbolism, mostly concerning duality.I'm reminded a little of Hesse's concern with duality, but here it is much more literal. It is not only the body that is divided in this novel, but the character too. This framing allows for a childlike exploration of the natur...
A short fairy-tale-like story about a nobleman who comes back from the war with the Turks horribly disfigured; his entire left-hand side has been shot to pieces (or has it?) and the one-eyed, one-legged, one-armed, half-gutted, half-brained (but not half-witted) nobleman seems to have gone through a personality change; it soon turns out that he's, well, evil. He treats his subjects horribly, and he's also become obsessed with cutting things in half.Of course, after a while it turns out his left-...
My first Calvino, and I have mixed feelings about this book. I did think it was well written and reasonably clever but for some reason also very predictable to me. I did pick up some of his criticism but I wasn't quite sure what was/were his main target(s). At first I thought it might be the church and religion, and probably was that, too, but after reading a bit about his background it seems it might have been communism (and right wing) and also the cold war that had just "heated" in 1952. In t...
"My uncle was then in his first youth, the age in which confused feelings, not yet sifted, all rush into good and bad, the age in which every new experience, even macabre and inhuman, is palpitating and warm with love of life." Vittore Carpaccio's 1510 painting, Young Knight in a Landscape, could have been an illustration for this Italo Calvino quote taken from the first pages of The Cloven Viscount, at a time in the story prior to a Turkish cannon firing a cannonball that split the poor Viscoun...
55th book of 2020.A very bizarre, short novel from Calvino, published some five years after his debut, Path to the Spider's Nest. The latter being a realist novel about the War, this is more reminiscent of Calvino's later postmodern work. The best way to explain this is by calling it a fairy tale, or a myth; it is told in that way, quite simply. It is about a Viscount who is blown perfectly in half by a cannonball, but lives. Without any spoilers, the surviving half returns from the War against
Calvino himself once said, “I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.” And this quote is certainly applicable in The Cloven Viscount, a wonderfully light and airy fantasy tale (though it has its own very dark elements for sure). Calvino’s style is straightforward and minimalistic but doesn’t attempt to completely absolve itself of artistry an...
Featured in my Top 5 Italo Calvino Books: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHHJq...As hilarious as it is thought-provoking, poised perfectly halfway between Calvino's 'straight' and 'quirky' novels. A great starting point for newbies and an immortal classic for everyone else.
A marxist fable. Holy war causes violent diremption of the aristocracy, which leads to a classical stasis. Very specifically the allegedly good half of the cloven is the left half, helping the impoverished while existing as a vagabond and moralizing against sin, a notably illiberal manner of critique, more in common with St. Anthony than Lenin. Less a marxist pronouncement than a utopian socialist one, therefore, we've been warned against it in the Manifesto of the Communist Party: In this way a...
This novel by Italo Calvino is from 1952 and is the first work of the trilogy of Our Ancestors, together with "The baron in the trees" and "The nonexistent knight". The story, told by the protagonist's nephew, is set in the 18th century. The protagonist is Viscount Medardo di Terralba, who, having joined the Christian army, leaves with his squire to go and fight the Turks. In the midst of an epic battle, Medardo is hit and split exactly in half by a cannon shot. From the serious episode only the...
☯️ Yin and yang
