To be a completed person, it means a combination with good and evil. Either form of extremes will only lead to a devastating disaster.

So fun! Sometimes I forget how silly Italo Calvino can be. Felt reminiscent of childhood stories of princesses and knights without being a children’s story

I loved this.

The Nonexistent Knight: Self-referential, postmodern, beautiful story, and weird narrator.
The Cloven Viscount: Regular story, no fancy techniques, interesting topic.

All in all, The Nonexistent Knight >> The Cloven Viscount.

*all around Italo Calvino Aug 2020

This is a tale of two novellas set in medieval time. Since there are always underlying hidden metaphors to Calvino’s writing, I believe both stories can also be read as existentialist meditations on the meaning of existence. (I think...) There's a kind of Shakespearean comedy element to all of this, especially in the hasty and tidy conclusion.

The Nonexistent Knight is a beautifully and humorously written story, linking the nonexistence with the how to exist, possibly what to pursue to make existence meaningful and valid; The Cloven Viscount, which is even more succinct, deals with the wholeness of being where he cuts viscount personality into half (good vs. bad), provoking and darkly moral.

Overall, Calvino is always beautiful story teller and his works are just a pure joy to read, but I am not a huge fan of Middle Age fantasy stories therefore couldn’t appreciate these tales fully.

Italo Calvino is a bit hit and miss in my experience. This was a miss. There were some moments that were wonderfully surreal, but for the most part I just didn’t care about anything that happened.

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I had tried to read another book by Calvino before, and could not get through the first ten pages. This time I was determined; I heard these two tales were his best, etc. Well, I struggled through them and made it, but I am not sure if I will ever read Calvino again. The writing did seem clunky, and I also wondered if this is due to translation, early career, or just simply a stylistic choice on Calvino's part. When the language is not there, it is hard to find the motivation to continue for me, at least in fiction. One good thing I can say, though, is that there are some gems here and there; some sentences are delightful in their concise wisdom.

The first tale is certainly the more humorous of the two. I kept thinking if only the Monty Python would adapt it to the screen, it would be hilarious. (Oh, wait, The Holy Grail!) The second tale seemed more moralistic. But with both, it is not clear what Calvino is trying to do, trying to say, and where the story is going at any given point. In the end, you get somewhere, but it is either too predictable - and after such an unpredictable ride, it is strange that the end be so trite - or too eh, whatever.

In the end, the stories suffered from exactly the same ailment that haunts some films of Terry Gilliam. Like the Adventures of Baron Munchausen or The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, where the fantastical images and ideas float about, bumping into each other, not quite making much sense, and dragging on for a while before they puff out in exhaustion, the Nonesixtent Knight, but especially the Cloven Viscount puff out and away, out of memory.

Very witty and humourous. A very pleasant read.

Calvino writes the most charming fables; his stories always make me smile, and usually they contain some sort of lesson or satirical element. The Cloven Viscount was the gem of this book. It's a morbid, violent little tale about the literal duality of man's good and evil nature, and how the extreme of good is just as off-putting as the extreme of evil.

Calvino virgins, however, should still begin their forays into his work with If On A Winter's Night A Traveler.

Calvino's blend of fantastic whimsy bordering on absurdism is always entertaining but then you're taken a bit by surprise as a fairly thought-provoking philosophical or moral critique emerges. "The Cloven Viscount" opposes excessive badness with excessive goodness, "The Nonexistent Knight" parodies Renaissance tales of courtly conduct (Quixote-style) as it actually discusses the nature of being and non-being.

Just fun folktales but maybe not for the whole family. Kinda wish there was a 3 1/2 star option for this one.

Entertaining early Calvino. The first story of the two, "The Non-Existent Knight" was actually written second was by far the better. A brisk, funny satire portraying Charlemagne's knights engaged in interminable, bureaucracy-riddled war, the story also features an absurdly twisty plot and a good early use of a nested narrative. The second story was a less layered fable, but mostly suffered from the back blurb giving its entire plot away, unfortunately stripping the story of momentum. Thanks so much overzealous publishers.