Books,books,and more books

Hello

Today i have both the book of Italo Calvino-The Castle of Crossed Destinies.
Is a small book with stories based on the tarot.
I´m looking for more tipes of books: tarot mixed with fiction,and your our advise will be well came.
Here are somme discrition of the book:


The master guidelines of this structure came from one of Italo Calvino’s books (1991), The Castle of Crossed Destinies, where a set of narratives is established from a deck of tarot cards, each one recombined to form the different stories. The combination of minimum and highly complex semantic units, using some specific previously stated rules, forms each narrative. The restriction imposed by these rules, as Calvino himself recognizes, stimulates creativity rather than restrain it.

In The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1976), Italo Calvino weaves a number of narratives around a group of medieval travellers staying at a highway inn:

This book is made first of pictures--the tarot playing cards--and secondly of written words. Through the sequence of the pictures stories are told, which the written word tries to reconstruct and interpret. (124)
Later, Calvino comments on the act of telling stories with the tarot and how it implicates all the untold stories hidden within the deck:

I realized the tarots were a machine for constructing stories; I thought of a book and I imagined its frame: the mute narratives, the forest, the inn; I was tempted by the diabolical idea of conjuring up all the stories that could be confined in a tarot deck.


http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0156154552/ref=nosim/aeclectic/


bye
paulo

Hi Paulo,

I am currently reading a book called Tarot Tales, edited by Rahcel Pollack and Caitlin Matthews. This book has several fiction writers, who all used Tarot in one way or another to create their story.

I believe it is out of print now, but I was able to find it for £2 at www.haybooks.com, at least I think that was the address.

Kiama

re: Crossed Destinies

My notes from my Amazon.com review:

I'm a beginner at reading Italian literature, but there's a few amusing things Calvino did here...he took pivotal scenes from classic literature such as

Orlando in Love
Orlando Furioso
Characters from Shakesphere

He then rematched them to the minature art of the time, tarocchi game cards.

I recognize excerpts of human passions from the poetry epic of Orlando in Love from Matteo Maria Boiardo, the Ferarra count, poet and storyteller for the D'Estes clan in the 1470s. Calvino also took parts of the Arthurian romantic tales that Boiardo, Aristo and other courtly poets and 'rematched' them to the trump and other cards of the classic Italian tarocchi.

I say rematched, as Boiardo and other poets/artists of D'Estes family members did allegorical praising in their poems or paintings that included direct or thinly disguised praises to their patrons. The patrons appear as romantic heroes amid Greco-Roman, Arthurian or other mythic landscapes.

The D'Estes and Visconti-Sforzas were related through marriages and both sets of families have historical tarocchi card sets---but it is the "completed" set from the Milanese Visconti-Sforzas that we are familiar with now.

I thought that I recognized a few of the fictional scenes that Calvino presented from Renaissance sources.

Best wishes,

Mari Hoshizaki

P.S. Love in Constaninople is also a tarot tale, with supposedly interchangeable endings/beginnings depending on the order. Unfortunately the little paperback has badly darkened black and white scans: Tarotgarden has color cards and there's a website of color scans. I'll post links separately to this thread.

Last Love in Constantinople

Color scans of the Last Love in Constantinople Tarot aka Vizantijski tarot or Byzantine tarot:

http://www.khazars.com/tarot.html

The book:

http://www.rastko.org.yu/knjizevnost/pavic/jmihailovic_carigrad_e.html

Amazon used to carry a paperback edition, which had the really cheesy black and white scans.

I'd advise looking at used hardcover copies through vendors at abebooks.com or amazon.com and calling or emailing them to ask if there are color pictures...

Tarotgarden.com lists this as part of a hardcover book called:

Poslednja Ljubav Tarot

Thank you for letting us know about this book by Italo Calvino, Paolo. I have read some Calvino (ages ago) but had no idea he was interested in Tarot. I will look forward to rediscovering Calvino.