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statcounter statisticsTitle - The Castle of Crossed Destiniues
Author - Italo Calvino
ISBN - 978-0-099-26805-5
"As the Moslem hordes had once been mowed down by Durendal, now the whirling of his club felled the fierce beasts that from Africa through the decay of the invasions had passed to the coasts of Provence and Catalonia; a cloak of feline pelts, tawny and striped and spotted, would cover the fields, now become desert where he passed; nor would the cautious lion, nor the linear tiger, nor the retractile leopard survive the slaughter."
The Castle of Crossed Destinies is two similar books in one volume - the titular book, and its successor, The Tavern of Crossed Destinies. Mr Calvino's note at the end says that he wanted to write a third book, The Motel of Crossed Destinies, but got more interested in other stories.

The Castle of Crossed Destinies is a story filled with stories, about stories, using tarot cards as a structure. Both Castle and Tavern are made up of multiple stories - The Tale of Roland Crazed with Love, The Tale of the Doomed Bride, the Tale of the Vampire's Kingdom, the Surviving Warrior's Tale, and so on - all bound together with the use of the tarot cards.

One does not need to know anything about the tarot and its symbolism to understand this book, but the reader would most likely benefit from having a pack of tarot cards to lay out, as the characters telling their stories do, so that one may follow the tales more easily. Here is very clearly grounds for criticism: books should not need props to be understood. Making this more pointed is that Mr Calvino uses superficial interpretations of the tarot cards, but these details are specific to the particular set he is using, and he uses different sets in both The Castle of Crossed Destinies and The Tavern of Crossed Destinies. Unless one has the very specific sets that Mr Calvino had, using a tarot deck to follow the stories is not going to help a great deal.

The whole point of The Castle of Crossed Destinies seems to be about the interaction of the visual symbols of the tarot cards [helpfully printed down the margins for the reader, albeit in rather confusing orders later in the book] and how they can be used to construct any story one wishes by being placed in different orders. This is, if nothing else, a wonderful exercise for writers; a pack of good tarot cards, richly illustrated, might well be the best friend of a writer in search of ideas. However I cannot help but feel that this sells short both the stories retold - reducing them to reshuffles of one another, not that life and history are not repetitive - but also the tarot cards, who are never allowed to show off any of their own significance.

The Castle of Crossed Destinies comes up with many good and interesting points from which many deep and thoughtful debates may arise, and possibly even essays. At one point Mr Calvino asserts that
The Devil should be the card that, in my profession, is most often encountered: is not the raw material of writing all a rising to the surface of hairy claws, cur-like scratching, goat's goring, repressed violences that grope in the darkness?
The idea that writing is born from violent urges is one that some people may find utterly bizarre and others may find utterly plausible [especially anyone who's read my writing].

Whilst the main point of The Castle of Crossed Destinies is about how stories - all stories, Mr Calvino seems to insist - can be constructed from a set of basic symbols, simple yet with underlying complexities in their individual states and great variation based upon the order and system of their arrangement, The Castle of Crossed Destinies itself lacks a story. It does not give satisfaction as a tale, because it is about the deconstruction of stories. Reading this book is like going to the theatre and being able to see everything that is going on in the wings, and the actors changing their costumes between parts. As an intellectual exercise in the construction of stories and the universality of forms in myths, The Castle of Crossed Destinies is a work of great interest, filled with food for thought and explorations of great characters from literature.

There are a great many of these - Faust, Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, Paris and Helen, Roland and Astolpho [all together now: who?], King Lear, Oedipus, Justine, Parsifal, others - one may note that the Bard is over-represented, to say the least. For a book dedicated to retelling old stories though a common set of symbols, the preponderance of Shakespearian characters is a little unsatisfying. Indeed, the characters are barely there at all. They are symbols, Cliff Note renderings of great old characters shuffled quickly up and down the tarot columns. There is no feeling, no emotion, no depth, no damned reason to care.

Furthermore, Mr Calvino's prose is not the comfiest thing to read. His sentences are long. Very long. At one point we are treated to a nine-line sentence, and his phrasing - or the work of his translator - often leaves much sense to be desired. He comes out with some wonderful lines, but just as often leaves the reader tied up in knots, trying to work out where he left his subjects and objects.

Of particular note is I Also Try To Tell My Tale, in The Tavern of Crossed Destinies, in which Mr Calvino attempts to construct his own story within the structure of his own story. Here is a writer, writing about writing, directly to the audience. At this point the pretense of fiction goes out the window; we are not watching the play, we are being taken on a guided tour of the backstage by the director. This was an utterly frustrating section to read, causing me to stop about once a page whilst Mr Calvino spun himself into loops. This may well be very clever, and a very meaningful discourse on the nature of writing, on how stories are constructed and how they can be told, but it is not actually a story. I find myself disliking this tale, if not the whole book, for the same reason I dislike most rap music - because it is about nothing but itself, like a skeleton gnawing on its own bones, never to have any meat.

I cannot call The Castle of Crossed Destinies bad writing, for it is competent and the work of an intelligent writer, and the artifice with which the structure of symbols and the interpretation of the stories within has been wrought is clearly good work. But it is not fiction, and one never stops being conscious that one is reading a book about stories rather than a story. The Castle of Crossed Destinies is a book about stories, pretending to be a story about stories, in which the writer writes about writing, telling a story about telling stories. This is not a story; it is a meta-story.

This brings up a very interesting point. Nobody with a serious mind to literary criticism could call Mr Reynolds a great author. Nobody could call Dark Disciple an immortal work of literature, a story to survive the ages. Nobody could doubt that Mr Calvino is an author of impeccable intellectualism, cleverness and talent. Nobody could doubt that The Castle of Crossed Destinies is a work of significance, of literary merit, worthy of deep consideration. Yet I would sooner re-read Dark Disciple than The Castle of Crossed Destinies. In fact, I would probably rather re-read Daemon World than The Castle of Crossed Destinies [certainly the characters of the latter are no flatter than those of the former].

This raises what is for me the most important question about writing: what are stories for? Because no matter how much one may intellectualize the process and function of storytelling, no matter how much one may invest it with the power of social engineering through symbolism and the reinforcement of systems and cultural mores, stories are entertainment. Reading is supposed to be fun. When writers forget that their purpose is to entertain the reader, to draw them into a story, to introduce them to new people and take them to new places, they have forgotten that they are, in a sense, up on a stage, under a spotlight, before an audience who are waiting to be entertained. Trying to do this without cast, costumes and scenery does not make a good play, nor does writing a story without strong characters, developed settings or a damned plot make a good read.

The Castle of Crossed Destinies is not entertainment, unless one is so cerebral that one is in danger of being visited by the mi-go. It may well be good reading to the type of person who enjoys plays where two characters stand facing away from one another for half an hour, saying nothing. It may appeal to those strange, unaccountable people who enjoy modern art. It does not appeal to me.

In short, trying to read The Castle of Crossed Destinies is like trying to have dinner by eating a cookery book.

This book is:
* - intellectualism over storytelling
* - about stories
* - long winded

This book is not:
* - going to require the reader to know anything about the tarot
* - particularly fun reading
* - satisfying
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