I will never get over how enchanting each piece of work Calvino produces is. These two stories round out the “Our Ancestors” trilogy, the first piece of work being Baron in the Trees. The Cloven Viscount is clever and funny, while The Nonexistent Knight is detailed and satisfying. The fable-like writing of the stories lean into messages of morality, status, and pride. His work is never short of brilliant.

Ligt het aan mij, of is het echt zo dat weinig mensen Italo Calvino kennen? Ik leerde deze schrijver kennen omdat iemand mij De baron in de bomen tipte. Geheel terecht. Straf, want ik hou niet bepaald van magisch realisme en laat Calvino een exponent van dit genre zijn.
Daarom stortte ik mij een tijdje geleden op De gespleten burggraaf, een boek dat dat duidelijk van dezelfde hand als als De baron in de bomen. Opnieuw een adellijke type, opnieuw een verhaal dat zich goeddeels in de natuur afspeelt, opnieuw een totaal van de pot gerukt uitgangspunt. En toch werkt het. Ik heb er opnieuw van genoten, al stoorde ik me wel een beetje aan de net-iets-te-opzichtige moraal. Ja, ik ga nog boeken van Calvino lezen.

"The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount" are my first Calvino novellas. I have to admit I am at a bit of a loss on how best to describe them. They remind me a bit of Aesop's fables for adults but they also have some of the same sensibilities and feel of liminality of a gothic novel. They are surprisingly dense thematically and philosophically. They are warm, funny, and absurd. I had a good time reading them and would love to read more of Calvino's work.

"The Nonexistent Knight" about a knight who only exists because he follows the strict codes of knighthood. It is a parody of chivalric tales. I think if I had to explain the concept of 'social construct' to someone I would point to this novella because it expresses the idea perfectly. There is a special place in my heart for Gurdaloo , the man who doesn't realize he exists, and believes "the world is soup."

"Cloven Viscount" is the story of a man that is split down the middle. One half is his good half and the other is his bad half. They both fall in love with the same woman. It is a darkly comedic tale of how inhuman it is to be completely good or completely evil.

I do recommend these novellas. The are quick, fascinating, and so much fun to read.

As someone with autism, I can say that the character Gurduloo from the Non-Existent Knight is a perfect metaphor for what it's like to have autism. You first see Gurduloo pretending to be a duck as a group of soldiers walk past, but immediately afterward, Gurduloo pretends to be an acorn. Gurduloo has no self-concept: he is whatever he happens to see. If he's with ducks, he's a duck. If he's with acorns, he's an acorn. If he's drinking soup, "all is soup."

Autism is a lack of self-concept like this. We don't extricate ourselves from the world and the things in it, so we assume that everything in it is a part of us, and that we are a part of everything. See this in how autistic people get "lost in" obsessions and how they tend not to like change. For if you're identified with whatever you're doing, to switch tasks would, literally, be death. Moreover, like Gurduloo does, you can lose track of who's supposed to say what, or even who is who, is a conversation. Gurduloo says this to Charlemagne, for instance:

“I touch my nose with the earth. I fall to my feet at your knees. I declare myself an august servant of your most humble majesty. Order and I will obey myself!” He brandished a spoon tied to his belt “And when your majesty says, ‘I order command and desire,’ and do this with your scepter, as I do, with this, d’you see? And when you shout as I shout, ‘I orderrr commanddd and desirrrre!’ you subjects must all obey me or I’ll have you strung up, you first there with that beard and silly old face.”

People with autism are identified with whatever they're doing. This has a good side and a bad side. It's good because there is an ecstasy that comes from completely losing yourself in your surroundings, as the Knights of the Grail show in this book (and the late autistic author Donna Williams shows in her book "Autism and Sensing: The Unlost Instinct"), but it's bad because we therefore end up being "prisoner of the world's stuff." We are beneath everything. So sometimes we try to have a distinct identity, and often (though hopefully not always, it tends to be devoid of the life we otherwise completely lose ourselves in. So we are either like Gurduloo, who exists but doesn't think he does, or like the Non-Existent Knight, an empty suit of armor that fights in battles, who doesn't exsit but thinks he does. The first is the stereotypical low-functioning autistic person. The second is the Big-Bang-Theory Asperger type.

Existence is nice, but so is non-existence.

I enjoyed the second novella better than the first, but maybe that’s because I had become better acquainted with the humor and style of Calvino. I am looking forward to exploring more.

I think it’s a very romantic story that doesn’t involve romance.

My first, and still my favorite. The two novellas housed in this tome are phenomenal examples of Calvino's craft, beautifully mixing the historical and the fantastical, the literal and the symbolic. Not as daring as If On a Winter's Night a Traveler and not quite as charming as The Baron in the Trees, The Nonexistent Knight and (particularly)The Cloven Viscount embodies everything I adore about his writing and writing in general.

Found this is a free library and what a gift it was! Delightful allegory, silly yet profound. Whimsical and meaningful at the same time! Was in a bit of a reading slump and i feel like this brought me out of it.

Tremendous translation that captures the wit and syntax of Calvino.

Two lighthearted novella-length fairy tales about "incomplete" people: an empty suit of armor and a nobleman split into two independently conscious halves. It's whimsical, funny at times, but at other times feels like it's trying a little too hard.

These are best appreciated as pure flights of fancy, without over-reading into the symbolisms (a book review quoted on the back cover of my edition calls it a "satire," which I think is perhaps much). For example, you can explicate about what the knight Agilulf's emptiness symbolizes, and it clearly does contribute to the idea that he is otherworldly, fastidious to the point of inhumanity, etc. But Agilulf is in fact not inhuman; he gets mixed up in amusing escapades, arouses sympathy at times, etc. and hollowness aside is not so dissimilar from some people I know. For me, he's just a character and the hollowness is an aspect, like Cassius having a lean and hungry look.

Both stories are fun, although "The Nonexistent Knight" is a cut better.

“Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.”

The premise was promising. The protagonists were interesting albeit cartoonish. I like both title characters, actually, and Charlemagne, too, in the first story. However, I think these novellas were too long to work as a fable. On the other hand, the stories were not compelling enough to sustain its purportedly allegorical meaning or even satire. Overall it felt unfinished. Each episode in the story is interesting enough on its own but as a whole the narrative structure felt too fragmented and badly paced and almost directionless. I think it’s missing that beautiful line or thread running through a plot that makes a story feel whole and focused and centered. An allegory without that kind of anchor is just pointless, artless, if not, altogether unreadable. An essay is better than artless or unreadable satire. (Or maybe I’m just missing the context? Maybe this was just a case of a bad translation? Who knows?)