Review: The Castle of Crossed Destinies

The Castle of Crossed Destinies
Italo Calvino
transl. William Weaver

"We began to spread out the cards on the table, face up, and to give them their proper value in games, or their true meaning in the reading of fortunes. And yet none of us seemed to wish to begin playing, and still less to question the future, since we were as if drained of all future, suspended in a journey that had not ended nor was to end. There was something else we saw in those tarots, something that no longer allowed us to take our eyes from the gilded pieces of that mosaic." (6)


The Castle of Crossed Destinies is essentially a two-part book made up of "interconnected" short stories or vignettes narrated by a group of travelers through tarot cards. The idea is that the travelers have magically lost the power of speech, and so they attempt to tell each other their histories-in-brief using different interpretations of the tarot cards. Part One of the book, "The Castle of Crossed Destinies," used the Italian Bembo deck (now obsolete), while Part Two, "The Tavern of Crossed Destinies," uses the French Marseilles deck. The difference is crucial since Calvino bases his interpretations primarily on the individual pictorial illustrations rather than on the usual "mystic" interpretations used in reading an entire tarot spread. Although the stories told in both Parts One and Two share thematic similarities, the different decks introduce variations in Calvino's invented and retold tales. Calvino also shows the illustrated cards in the margins of the stories, in the order that they appear in the narrative. The stories are "told" in two files, horizontal or vertical, and interconnect at points--hence my use of "interconnected" at the beginning of this paragraph.

I bought this book because of my recent passionate love affair with Calvino, rekindled by a re-reading of if on a winter's night a traveler and by the brand-new experience of Cosmicomics and Invisible Cities, all of which I absolutely adored. [See the earlier review of Cosmicomics somewhere in my archives...] Again, reading Calvino is a lot like drinking heavy cream; either you love it or its too rich and smothers you. I have to admit, The Castle of Crossed Destinies was vaguely disappointing, but I am still an ardent lover of everything Calvino does. I have a lot to say about this book, but for the sake of space and my poor dying wrists, I'll try to keep it short.

Reading this book, I uncovered two major premises that Calvino was working with, the first and more obvious being the use of tarot cards to tell a story in pictures. I thought that premise was brilliant, but I did think that the execution was lacking, more so in "Castle" than in "Tavern." To me, "Castle" didn't pull me in as much as it could have; it seemed too relaxed, and I didn't see the desperation of a group of mute travelers urgently wishing to tell their stories. I got more of that in "Tavern," when each story seemed to possess an undercurrent of desperation, and Calvino keeps reiterating that "it is difficult to fit one card to another [...] because for every new card the young man tries to align with others, ten hands are outstretched to take it from him and insert it in another story each one is constructing" (65). Although Calvino doesn't take pains to develop these characters--and understandably so since it isn't at all what he's trying to get at--I sympathized/empathized with them more in "Tavern." I have other reasons for liking Part Two also; I'll get into that in a minute.

Despite being vaguely disappointed in the execution, I do think Calvino delivered in terms of ideas. In Part One, I loved the idea of selling a city's soul "The Alchemist Who Sold His Soul," and "The Doomed Bride" was interesting, and I thought the pivotal stories of Roland were written beautifully. But there is, as always, the problem of losing something in the translation between written and pictorial art. I have a working knowledge of tarot readings and common interpretations, and I tried to find larger images of the cards Calvino was working with, but the Bembo deck is pretty much obsolete, so I ended up giving myself eyestrain trying to study and interpret the illustrations in the margins of the book. The "Tavern" ran a little differently since it's fairly easy to come by illustrations of the Marseilles deck, and I had fun going back and retelling the stories myself through different interpretations, reversals, etc. I really enjoyed just about all the stories in "The Tavern," especially "I Try Also to Tell My Tale" (but maybe that's me as a writer!). I also love that Calvino encourages "authorial instinct" by including his method of spreading the cards, e.g. from Part One "The Castle":

thus allowing for new interpretations reversing Calvino's stories, or altogether new stories told along the diagonals and around the square. His tarot spread in "The Tavern" more explicitly tells many more stories using more of the available space and most of the possible directions... So, "The Tavern," then.

Now, this could be my personal reading of the book and of Calvino's intention, but what I really enjoyed about The Castle, particularly Part Two "The Tavern," was the less apparent premise that all stories are one. In "The Castle" Calvino makes clear references to literary figures like Faust and Roland but portrays them in a different light or under different circumstances (though Roland, I believe, is more or less a straight retelling? I don't know about Astolpho). In "The Tavern," Calvino invents his own stories and then relates them in detail to literature and mythology: the stories of Hamlet, Oedipus, Justine, Perceval, Lady Macbeth, Faust (again!), Helen of Troy, and King Lear. He also makes references to St. Jerome and St. George and the dragon in his own tale, "The Writer's Tale," which judging by the scarcity of marginal illustrations relies only lightly on the tarot cards and instead tries to explain the purpose of storytelling. And this, I think, is the pivotal story of the entire novel.

In that story, "I Also Try to Tell My Tale," figures from all of the other stories appear even though the anonymous narrator here has not narrated the other stories. The characters do not belong to him. He then spends pages describing how he believes the extroverted St. George and the introverted St. Jerome can be made out to be each other, "in the way painters and writers have of believing in a story that has gone through many forms, and with painting and repainting, writing and rewriting, if it was not true, has become so" (108). I think because the execution of his premise in "The Tavern" became so lucid, I enjoyed Part Two more thoroughly than I did Part One, although in retrospect, once I'd figured out what he was going for, I liked the whole book very much.

The unspoken question here is perhaps what I found most intriguing about the book: how many stories exist in the world, and what if we run out of them? As a writer, I subconsciously worry that one day all the stories will be told, or maybe they have been told already, and then what am I going to do? Is it inevitable, can it be avoided? Do stories possess a limitless capacity for retelling, reworking; do they ever get old? I don't know. Calvino admits in "The Writer's Tale" that he also doesn't know. But he offers a possible solution, and the possibility of many retellings, as compensation, and once I figured out what he was saying, the writer in me really appreciated that.

Maybe it's because of that little worry of mine that I did, by the end of the novel, enjoy it so tremendously that I immediately reread it and studied the tarot cards to make up my own versions. I have to admit I found something intensely freeing about Calvino's conclusion, "And perhaps they really are one story, the life of the same man: maturity, old age, and death" (109). That it's all right that all stories emerge from one another, take new shape in their own reversals, can be reworked across tangent diagonals and at crossroads with other people's stories. Who would have thought that King Lear could also exist in Hamlet? But it does.

Review: Pale Fire

Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. (33)


This excerpt is not representative of Pale Fire. I try to choose excerpts that are, but I was at a total loss with this novel. So I'll just try to describe it as best I can.

Pale Fire reads like a critical analysis of a long poem written by a fictional poet, John Shade; the also fictional author of the critical work, Charles Kinbote, writes a Foreword to the poem, titled "Pale Fire," and then includes the four Cantos of Shade's poem, and ends with a very long, in-depth Commentary and close-reading of almost every line in the poem. The Commentary ends up being very reflective of Kinbote's past and his character, and reveals certain aspects about him that make the novel worth reading. The premise is that "Pale Fire" is the last poem John Shade wrote and he was shot by an unlikely assassin the night he completed it. Kinbote drew up a contract with Shade's widow saying that the right to analyze and publish the poem was exclusively his. Unfortunately I'm afraid to say too much more, since the Commentary, which makes up the main part of the novel, also gives away Kinbote's story bit by bit. I can say that there is a great deal of suspense and intrigue in the book, and the gradual revelation of Kinbote's strange character is chilling but at the same time oddly understandable. He idolized the poet, and because we see the poet through his eyes, some of Kinbote's actions and extravagances concerning Shade seem perfectly normal, albeit with a slightly creepy tenor.

Nabokov's prose is as clever as always, and the way he unobtrusively works the major theme of "literary idolatry" into the novel is amazing. The ending felt a little inconclusive considering the gradual, momentous buildup of the rest of the story, but that's a small complaint in light of the novel's strange beauty. It's an incredibly fresh look at what it means (to some, anyway) to love literature, worship authors, and look critically at an author's work. It also raises the ever present, never voiced questions about the reader's desire to find herself in the work, and tacks on theories about how far that reader might go, given the chance.

English majors and critical English people--this is definitely the book for you. But I also highly recommend for anyone who loves to read and who at any time in their lives (like I used to) put her favorite authors on a pedestal and loved them, too.

James Frey

…is single-handedly undermining the memoir genre, and I hate him for it. I don’t care how powerful his book is, or how much Oprah supports him, or even if (to be temporarily elitist here) readers call in on NPR and CNN to say that it really doesn’t bother them that he lied about this or that. I promise you, this doesn’t personally concern you half as much as it concerns me. I mean, fuck, there’s a reason we have clear delineations of fiction and non-fiction, and why memoir exists in the first place. The power of memoirs is their truth. The reader accepts the writer’s words as truth, or close enough truth—I’m not going to pretend that things don’t get confused or lost in memory. I’ve tried a memoir before (half-finished and now indefinitely on hold) and sure, I was interpreting things differently and misremembering things. But Frey saying that he purposely stretched the truth to make his experiences exciting and believable—saying that he was going for shock value to sell books—saying that people wanting to read about alcoholism and drug abuse wouldn’t read his memoir unless he had some kind of shock value in it—that sickens me.

It’s false journalism on some level, purposely lying to a trusting audience. To be honest, I could give less of a shit about being lied to, but it undermines the non-fiction genre. I’ve been overhearing less than intelligent conversations about how you just can’t trust any book, all authors exaggerate everything, etc. That puts us in a bit of a fix. Frey could have just called his book fiction if all he was trying to do was get across a message that would sell. I don’t mind the lying so much as his motives for doing so, and the way he deceived his audience in order to do so. RARRRR.

I'm starting to lose coherence, so I’m gonna quote one of my professors, Nicholas Christopher, from an interview he did about this on NPR: "[...] you know, Mr. Frey said something to the effect, "Well, the definition of memoir"--and perhaps it's the third or fourth one--"is story, and this is my story." Well, if someone said that to you over a cup of coffee in your everyday life, after telling you a whopper, you'd think that's ridiculous. If you're remembering something, you're remembering it as best you can, and you're giving me the facts. And you're perhaps dramatizing them or enhancing them with fine language, with musical language, whatever, but you're not distorting them completely and telling me it's true. If you're doing that, put a different label on it. I mean, I really don't think this is a complicated issue. I think it's being made complicated by people backtracking, whether it's the author, publishers, whoever, and trying to concoct, you know, all kinds of pretty ways of putting this when, in effect, it really was a con job."

Amen. Now for the love of God, call a spade a spade and put the fucking issue to rest.