Meanwhile, a group of hermits find Buono in the bushes. With one eye and a dilated single nostril, he returns to Terralba, twisting the half mouth of his half face into a scissors-like half smile. The army field doctors save Gramo through a stitching miracle the Viscount is "alive and cloven". Fearless, he scrambles over the battlefield with sword bared, and is split in two by a cannonball hitting him square in the chest.Īs a result of the injury, Viscount Medardo becomes two people: Gramo (the Bad) and Buono (the Good). On the first day of fighting, a Turkish swordsman unhorses the inexperienced Viscount. The Viscount Medardo of Terralba and his squire Kurt ride across the plague-ravaged plain of Bohemia en route to join the Christian army in the Turkish wars of the seventeenth century. The Cloven Viscount was collected together with The Baron in the Trees and The Nonexistent Knight in a single volume, Our Ancestors, for which Calvino was awarded the Salento Prize in 1960. It was first published by Einaudi (Turin) in 1952 and in English in 1962 by William Collins, with a translation by Archibald Colquhoun. The Cloven Viscount ( Italian: Il visconte dimezzato) is a fantasy novel by Italian writer Italo Calvino. Every Calvino book I read shows a slightly different side to the author, and two of these had a fantastical air about them that I haven't come across in quite a while.Cover of the first US edition, published by Random House. Overall I was impressed by this set of three stories.
There is a good amount of humour gained from the farcical and ridiculous in this one, but it is balanced by the deeper reflections too, which means fans of the author will be left pleased. Here Calvino has another excellent and somewhat fantastical tale to tell, which not only succeeds as a whole but in the details too. The book is probaby worth picking up for this story alone, if you happen upon it, though it is also included in other volumes. Despite being a translation, the prose presumaby retains a lot of its original quality, as it was, in varying measures throughout, charming, clever, and inspiring. It is the sort of story, that while reading, I became involved in to the point where I could imagine myself there, and forgot about everything else around me.
While this story is to an extent more credible, it is also much more entertaining than the first. Like the first, it is about an unusual Italian nobleman, set in Italy in fuedal times. This is the second story in the book, and is quite a lot longer than the other two. The Cloven Viscount is an amusing, surreal, and dark story, if brief, and ultimately predictable. I was perhaps expecting more, based on previous experiences of Calvino, but the story was alright, having said that.
It wasn't a bad story, but I felt slightly let down. The first sory was fairly short, being around 70 pages. This book contains 3 stories: The Cloven Viscount, The Baron In The Trees, and The Non-Existent Knight.
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