Description
Book SynopsisA group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their stories. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal and chaotic history of all human consciousness.
Trade ReviewA work that celebrates storytelling… Magical. -- Fiona Wilson * The Times *
The interlinking of tales is incredibly complex and subtle: a history of all human consciousness through the myths of Oedipus, Parsifal, Faust, Hamlet and so on.
The Castle of Crossed destinies is a shamelessly original work of art-beautiful in the sense that it is the careful statement of an artist we have learned to trust * New Yorker *
Italo Calvino has advanced far beyond his American and English contemporaries. As they continue to look for the place where the spiders make their nests, Calvino has not only found this special place but learned how himself to make fantastic webs of prose to which all things adhere -- Gore Vidal
The marriage of the verbal and the visual in
The Castle of Crossed Destinies seems almost prodigious. It is as if sulpher and mercury had at last fused into gold * Times Literary Supplement *
