The Castle of Crossed Destinies is a 1973 novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .Lionised in Britain and the United States,...

. Its narrative details a meeting among travelers who are inexplicably unable to speak after traveling through a forest

Forest

A forest, also referred to as a wood or the woods, is an area with a high density of trees. As with cities, depending where you are in the world, what is considered a forest may vary significantly in size and have various classification according to how and what of the forest is composed...

. The characters in the novel recount their tales via Tarot cards, which are reconstructed by the narrator

Narrator

A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...

. The novel is in two parts, each using a different style Tarot deck. The first part was published alone in 1969 as Tarocchi: Il mazzo visconteo di Bergamo e New York (Tarots: The Visconti Pack

Visconti-Sforza tarot cards

The Visconti-Sforza tarot deck is a 15th century Tarot deck and one of the oldest known to exist. It had a significant impact on the visual composition, card numbering and interpretation of modern decks.-Overview:...

 in Bergamo and New York). The second part, with the header "The Tavern of Crossed Destinies", features the Tarot of Marseilles

Tarot of Marseilles

The Tarot of Marseilles , also widely known by the French designation Tarot de Marseille, is one of the standard patterns for the design of tarot cards...

.

The novel is an exploration of how meaning is created, whether that be written via words (by the author, via the book, since the characters in the book cannot speak to each other) or by images (the tarot cards — considered prophetic to some and are themselves open to many symbolic interpretations). It is, as often in Calvino's works, multi-layered, and several levels of interpretations and readings are possible, based on the relationships between author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

-narrator-characters

Fictional character

A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...

-reader

Reading (process)

Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols for the intention of constructing or deriving meaning . It is a means of language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information and ideas...

.

See also

• 1973 in literature
  1973 in literature
  The year 1973 in literature involved several significant events and the writing of many notable books.-Events:*September 25 - The funeral of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda becomes a focus for protests against the new government of Augusto Pinochet...
  
  
• Italian literature
  Italian literature
  Italian literature is literature written in the Italian language, particularly within Italy. It may also refer to literature written by Italians or in Italy in other languages spoken in Italy, often languages that are closely related to modern Italian....