Bisected across European wars we have two stories: one an absurdly hilarious bureaucratic satire in the midst of an existential crisis; the other an entertainingly gothic fable.

One sees a sentient suit of armour defending the one thing it has to prove its existence—a title—after the virginity of a woman he saved from rape, thus ensuring his knighthood, is called into question. The other sees a Viscount split in two during a battle, each half embodying his best and worst qualities. One is the funniest thing I can recall reading. One is messier than the other, however it contains the far more interesting themes. Both, however, are very, very good.

Po tej książce pokochałam czytać.

All Calvino is automatically 5 stars.

"Maybe mad's not quite the right word for him. He's just a person who exists and doesn't realise he exists."

World conditions were still confused in the era when this took place. It was not rare then to find names and thoughts and forms and institutions that corresponded to nothing in existence. But at the same time the world was polluted with objects and capacities and persons who lacked any name or distinguishing mark. It was a period when the will and determination to exist, to leave a trace, to rub up against all that existed, was not wholly used since there were many who did nothing about it--from poverty or ignorance or simply from finding things bearable as they were--and so a certain amount was lost into the void. Maybe too there came a point when this diluted will and consciousness of self was condensed, turned to sediment, as imperceptible watery particles condense into banks of clouds; and then maybe this sediment merged by chance or instinct, with some name or family or military rank or duties or regulations, above all in an empty armor, for in times when armor was necessary even for a man who existed, how much f themore was it for one who didn't. Thus it was that Agilulf of the Guildivern had begun to act and acquire glory for himself.

When I love Italo Calvino, I really love him. It is for the witty way that he plays with narrative, the playful way he can dip in and out of reality. This book was nice taste of what I like about him. It combines two novellas which, along with a third story not included in this edition, make up the collection Our Ancestors: The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees, The Non-Existent Knight. The first, from which the above excerpt is taken, tells of a knight who is simply an empty suit of armor. He's a very perfect and successful suit of armor, but he can't eat or sleep or do anything a normal knight could do. And when he finds that his knighthood may rest on an error, so that his rank and accomplishments may not be real either, he is sent into a rather understandable identity crisis which leads to a major quest. Some of the scenes in this novella could easily be source material for some of the vignettes in Monty Python's Holy Grail (it's been too long since I've read Arthurian legend to know if some of them go back that far). The second novella is about a Viscount who is cut in two in a battle. The half people can find is stitched up on the field by battle surgeons and returns home, but turns out to be quite nasty and evil. Later, the other half, which is all good, but in some ways equally problematic, shows up as well, having survived after all. This is an amusing meditation on the different sides of each of us, and what it might be like if either existed, unbalanced and alone. I look forward to reading the third novel in the set, which I have under separate cover, waiting on my shelves.

Finished it over two nights in a bar in budapest.

Ah, I guess to me Budapest will be the city of four calvinos. Went to a secondhand bookstore during my last week in Amsterdam and bough all their Calvinos bc I've never seen any of them on a shelf in australia. And took them with me to Budapest.

Fun!

This was a good introduction to Calvino's works. There were elements I really liked but wasn't totally into either of the stories.

This is a very sweet, beautifully written, and most importantly, short book. It is exactly the right length, and that is something it is hard to be. Most things are either slightly too long or somewhat too short. It lasts exactly the length that its ideas and the beauty of its prose can sustain and then exits gracefully, leaving a fond memory.

After crawling through the Faerie Queen for months, the Non-Existent Knight is like being given a glass of clear water after being forced to eat honey for days. Its rare that irony doesn't tire or irritate me after a while. Measure, in excess, is a lumpy lead whip, but here consideration, and distance mix with affection and immediacy to pleasing affect.

The translation is by Archibald Colquhoun, who lives up to his magnificent name. The prose ranges from good to exceptional.

"I long to hurry on with my story, tell it quickly, embellish every page with enough duels and battles for a poem; but when I pause and start rereading I realise my pen has left no mark on the paper and the pages are blank.

To tell it was I would like this blank page would have to bristle with reddish rocks, flake with pebbly sand, sprout sparse juniper trees. In the midst, on a twisting ill-marked trac, I would set Agilulf, passing erect on his saddle, lance at rest. But this page would have to be not only a rocky slope but the dome of the sky above, slung so low that there is room only for a flight of cawing rooks in between. With my pen I should also trace faint dents in the paper to represent the slither of an invisible snake through grass or a hare crossing a heath, suddenly coming into the clear, stopping, sniffing around through its short whiskers, then vanishing again."

The primary story is about Agilulf Emo Bertrandin of the Guildivern and of the Others of Corbentraz and Sura, Knight of Slimpia Citeriore and Fez, a knight who is an empty suit of perfectly white and perfectly maintained armour sustained only by "will power .. and faith in our holy cause!", and about a range of chivalric characters who orbit around him and intersect with his path.

The second is about the Viscount Medardo, who is blown into exactly two equal pieces by a turkish cannon, with both surviving separately, and, at first, unknown to each other. One of the pieces is entirely good and the other entirely bad. If you've seen that episode of Star Trek then you get the gist.

The tragi-comic character of Agilulf dominates the memory of the tale, a man, or thing, who believes absolutely that he is an Knight, and so is, sustained only by that belief. At dusk he obsessively arranges pine cones in perfect triangles and arranges further geometries, to fend of the vagaries of indeterminate shadow which fret at his will. He feasts with Charlemagne as, since he is afforded a chair due to his rank, he *must* attend, and occupies himself in endless and precise divisions and re-arrangements of food into ever smaller crumbs and parcels, before ordering the remains taken away and more brought.

He is a modern character and reminds us of a lot of the quasi-robotic, hyper-logical, rule-obsessed contextless characters we remember from genre fiction.

The most charming scene involves his attempted (well, actual) seduction by the Widow Priscilla in which the humanless man bends ever-so-slightly in his measured existence and twists his tables of knowledge and response-algorithms in such as way as to come as close as he can to the image of the romantic knight. It is a scene and situation, with a mood and a fineness that could occur nowhere else but in this book.

The women are interesting, especially in The Cloven Viscount, the character of Pamela, who the story finds; "as she lay, plump and barefoot, in a simple pink dress, face downwards in the grass, dozing, chatting to the goats and sniffing flowers.

It is a surprisingly sexy book. There is a lot of boning, a lot of women wanting sex and a rather practical attitude to the possibility of sexual violence that might worry the more sensitive modern reader.

The Cloven Viscount has what should really be considered some strong horror elements, but the mood, tone and feel of the story never slip into actual fear, maintaining a combination of calm measured affectionate detachment and a kind of butter-drenched Ray Bradbury-esque summery nostalgia, which conflicts with the actions in the story in ways I'm sure are a deliberate, or at least accepted, part of the design.

The ideas in both books are held lightly. Again, if you've seen a lot of scinece fiction, you've got the basics. This is better and more elengant than the basics though.

I'm not sure if Calvino is a natural genre writer born into a literary culture or class, and if he is I'm not sure if that's a tragedy or not, but he seems to have made the best of the situation.

This book does not get five stars because I did not find the setting of either of the two novellas to be compelling and each of the two stories does not become interesting until you are at least half way through. Despite these shortcomings, each novella did conclude with a twist that leaves you feeling satisfied and makes the time spent reading worthwhile.

Much too short and obvious

The Nonexistent Knight : 2
The Cloven Viscount: 4

Actual rating: 3.5 stars