Calvino, Italo (Vol. 8) | Calvino, Italo 1923–
Calvino, Italo 1923–
Italian novelist and short story writer, Calvino was a member of the Italian resistance during World War II; the events of this time recur in his work. His fiction blends reality and fantasy in both realistic description and surrealistic expression. (See also CLC, Vol. 5.)
What Italo Calvino has done [in Il castello dei destini incrociati] is to take two different packs of Tarot cards, a fifteenth-century one from Renaissance Italy, and a much more plebeian one from eighteenth-century Marseilles, and to dispose the individual cards as systematically as he found possible as the supports of brief narratives. His use of the cards, in fact, is very precisely the use of them once made by fortune-tellers. But his methods are more complicated. As the title suggests, the stories he makes up from the sequences of adjoining cards must be made to intersect….
The stories in [the first] half are adapted to the origins...
[The entire page is 7581 words long]
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