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The Cloven Viscount
The Cloven Viscount
The Cloven Viscount
Audiobook2 hours

The Cloven Viscount

Written by Italo Calvino

Narrated by Edoardo Ballerini

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bissected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. The two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, fight a bloody duel, and achieve a miraculous resolution. Now available in an independent volume for the first time, this deliciously bizarre novella is Calvino at his most devious and winning.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 22, 2017
ISBN9781501963513
Author

Italo Calvino

ITALO CALVINO (1923–1985) attained worldwide renown as one of the twentieth century’s greatest storytellers. Born in Cuba, he was raised in San Remo, Italy, and later lived in Turin, Paris, Rome, and elsewhere. Among his many works are Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveler, The Baron in the Trees, and other novels, as well as numerous collections of fiction, folktales, criticism, and essays. His works have been translated into dozens of languages.

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Reviews for The Cloven Viscount

Rating: 3.8143813795986623 out of 5 stars
4/5

299 ratings2 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A viscount gets blown in two by cannon fire during battle but miraculously survives and returns home as literally half a man. This half is all evil, though, and spends his days terrorizing the countryside. One day his other half, which also survived the battle, arrives home and travels round to the local residents doing as much good as he possibly can, even if the results are sometimes not exactly wanted. So one is too evil and the other too good, until they finally battle one another and rediscover an equilibrium.Meh. I've loved the other Calvino stuff I've read, but this one fell flat for me. A little too heavy handed with the parable feel, maybe, and also maybe a little too silly.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Another fantabulous fable from a wonderful weaver of tales. Here we have a man cut in half (both literally and figuratively of course). It would be too easy to say, this is a story of man who's not complete. Sure it's that, but it's so much more (as all great art, it has layers). In only 90 pages, it's also about everyone else reacting to this incompleteness. It's about how we do things without realizing it, and it's about how we see and act in the world through our own narrow lenses. But the beauty of it is the way it's told, with that Calvino-esque fluidity that makes it seem natural and real (but it's just a fairy tale...), and just-the-way-it-is. And the thing is, all those layers of meaning, they're there because the story is true...