The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount

Magical realism was never more magic than when Italo Calvino wrote it. While the two novellas "The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount" are early work, his quirky satire and strange fantasy are in fine form here. The best description of Calvino's writing is: fairy tales for adults, which are smart and funny at the same time. "The Nonexistant Knight" opens with Charlemagne and his army preparing for a massive battle -- except that one knight named Agilulf is, technically, nonexistant. Okay, he's the very image of honor and chivalry, but he's also a walking empty suit of white armor. For some reason, Charlemagne doesn't seem disturbed by this. Fortunately, Agilulf is able to do his job despite not existing; Calvino's meditations on this are outstanding. Because of his ultra-perfection, Agilulf ends up attracting a naive young soldier, a feisty warrior woman, and an odd young knight who is looking for the Order of the Holy Grail. A Shakespearean tangle of sorts emerges before things start to sort themselves out... "The Cloven Viscount" is a simpler work: A viscount is hit by a Turkish cannonball that somehow splits him in half. Surprisingly, he's not dead -- they're able to save the right half of his body. But when the right half goes home, it becomes increasingly clear that it only has half the personality as well. And unfortunately, it's the evil half. As the various peasants try to deal with the viscount's vicious acts, the left half shows up as well. As it happens, the left half is the good half. He's also, despite his goody-goody personality, as much of a menace as the evil side. Can the two halves somehow get back into a whole man, or will they drive everyone else nuts? Italo Calvino's work is always a bit whimsical, but there is actual substance under the whimsy. For example, Agilulf is rigidly devoted to protocol and form, because he has nothing inside him. I'm pretty sure every person has met someone like Agilulf. Or, for that matter, glimpsed the two halves that lie inside every human being. Don't think it's all stuffy philosophy, though. One of Calvino's greatest talents was to make a hugely entertaining story that never became preachy, only funny. While the subtext of "Viscount" is obvious, "Knight" is a sort of satire on medieval chivalry tales. And that is where Calvino excels; "Viscount," while good, is a bit heavy-handed in places. But his macabre, slightly strange sense of humor keeps it from being goofy or preachy. His writing is formal, clear and evocative and starkly pretty, with only some key details. But it is peppered with funny lines and undignified characters. One of the best lines of "Knight" is at the beginning, where Charlemagne comments (entirely seriously), "Well, for someone who doesn't exist, you seem in fine form." Calvino's offbeat parables and satires are always excellent, and his early pair of novellas are no exception. Funny, strange and thought-provoking, these are a pair of modern classics.

Calvino rarely, if ever, disappoints. This book includes two early stories, both of which have everything you would expect from Calvino: surrealism, wisdom, fabulism, and poignancy derived from bizarre and unexpected sources. Reading them is a unique experience, much like reading anything Calvino has written; these stories, being earlier works, are slightly more conventional (for Calvino) in that they follow a plot line and a story unfolds linearly (contrasted with later works such as "Invisible Cities" or "Cosmicomics" where there's a story, but not in a completely conventional sense)."The Nonexistent Knight" is about just that: a knight in Charlemagne's army who doesn't exist, but "inhabits" an empty suit of armor. The knight, Agilulf, is an exemplar of chivalry, and annoys almost everyone. When the validity of his knighthood is brought into question, a great chase ensues between the main characters of the story, which, when the smoke clears, culminates in a "confession" of the narrator. The story's mood is a strangely profound tongue-in-cheek. It is moving, funny, and intense."The Cloven Viscount", by contrast, is a harsh and violent story that includes enough whimsy to keep it from sinking into a hopelessly depressing tale. After the mostly upbeat feel of "The Nonexistent Knight" the brutal imagery of this story is shocking. The story involves a Viscount who is in fact cloven, that is, literally cloven in two by a Turkish cannon. He is not only cloven physically, but in other more interesting ways. The implications this story presents are numerous and incredibly thought-provoking. When the two halves of the Viscount occupy the same town, the feelings of the townsfolk are summed up in this brilliant passage: "...our sensibilities became numbed, since we felt ourselves lost between an evil and a virtue equally inhuman."This short book is another incredible example of the writing of Italo Calvino. It may not be his absolute best work, but even Calvino at his worst makes for engaging and unforgettable reading. His stories defy description and stretch the boundaries of literature beyond what is usually expected. After reading one of his books, you just want to read more.

Viscount Medardo of Terralba has ridden across the plain of Bohemia to join the war against the Turks. When battle commences, he flings himself into the mêlée. Young and foolish, he attacks a Turkish cannon from the front and receives a cannonball in the chest. His left half is completely blown away. After dusk, during a truce, his remains are gathered up and operated on by the surgeons. Miraculously, they are able to save his right half; now he is "alive and cloven".Thus begins Calvino's first fantasy, one of the most highly imaginative and amusing of his modern fables. Published in Italy in 1951, The Cloven Viscount was Calvino's attempt at writing the sort of book he would like to read himself, the sort of book "by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic."Until then, Calvino had practised realism, charting postwar upheaval and social concerns in his native country. Yet The Cloven Viscount seems to have more to say about the human condition in times of crisis than his earlier works. For example, the nature of good and evil and the incompleteness of the soul are themes explored here in depth. But The Cloven Viscount is not a straightforward allegory or purely symbolic text. Calvino was pleased that the meanings of his tales were "always a little uncertain" and that "no single key will turn all their locks."Leaning heavily on a crutch, the Viscount returns home and starts causing mischief. It soon becomes clear that it is the bad half of the Viscount that has survived. He begins to terrify the local peasants with his cruel and spiteful acts, spending much of his time cutting in half everything he can get his hands on. It is his wish, he confesses, to "halve every whole thing... as there's beauty and knowledge and justice only in what's been cut to shreds."The narrator, the Viscount's nephew, does his best to stay out of his uncle's way. Together with Dr Trelawney, an alcoholic scientist, he wanders graveyards at night, looking for wills-o'-the wisp. It is Dr Trelawney's ambition to capture one in a bottle. Yet the Viscount spares no efforts in attempting to murder the pair of them and the rest of the population, aided in his nefarious schemes by Master Pietrochiodo, a carpenter cursed with a genius for constructing unusual apparatus of torture and execution.The reign of terror is only threatened when the Viscount's other half turns up. Tended by necromancers after the battle, this other half has been travelling across the land, performing good deeds. The Bad 'Un and the Good 'Un, as they are respectively known, constantly try to outdo each other. Ironically, the Good 'Un manages to cause as much trouble as the Bad 'Un.With its wealth of invention, peculiar ideas and extraordinary insights, The Cloven Viscount paved the way for Calvino's more mature work. Like Baron in the Trees and The Non-Existent Knight, books with which it forms a loose triptych, The Cloven Viscount began as a single image; the image of

These are wonderful novellas. Written as fables, there appeal lies on one level as simple fictional tales about knights and castles, so it could be something that children could enjoy quite easily. From there, it grows. Calvino packs so much wisdom and inquisitiveness into these stories, that it takes on the form of a metaphysical inquiry into morality, epistomology, and science. In "The Nonexistent Knight," the penultimate hollow man shuffles through Charlemagne's Europe maintaining some kind of external order, at least. That's all he has to offer to the world, of course, because there is nothing inside the shell. Don't you know people like that?Then in "The Cloven Viscount," a parable in an ethical style, Calvino splits a person in two and takes the reader on the journey of exploring all the ramifications of that fissure. I believe these could be taught in a philosophy course, a literature course, read at the bedside with junior, and taken to the beach for summer reading, and an easy book to talk about at a dinner party or in a book group.

For anyone with a penchant for the rather obscure, the outrageously funny, and the dazzling world of Italo Calvino, this book ranks as one of the author's finest works.The tales of a suit of armor out to vindicate himself, and a count with literally "split personalities" is colored with heavy doses of wit, and a dab of philosophical discourse. Prose flows effortlessly accross your tongue as you read. And you don't seem to notice the passage of time. The characters, especially the protagonists, prove to be very endearing. For anyone who hasn't read Calvino, this is as good as any book to start with. It gets the bandwagon rolling.