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    The Nonexistent Knight
    The Nonexistent Knight
    The Nonexistent Knight
    Audiobook4 hours

    The Nonexistent Knight

    Written by Italo Calvino

    Narrated by Jefferson Mays

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    About this audiobook

    An empty suit of armor is the hero in this witty novella, a picaresque gem-now available in an independent volume for the first time-that brilliantly parodies medieval knighthood. Set in the time of Charlemagne and narrated by a nun with her own secrets to keep, The Nonexistent Knight tells the story of Agilulf, a gleaming white suit of armor with nothing inside it. A challenge to his honor sends Agilulf on a search through France, England, and North Africa to confirm the chastity of a virgin he saved from rape years earlier. In the end, after many surprising turns of plot, a closing confession draws this sparkling novella to a perfect finish.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateAug 10, 2018
    ISBN9781501963537
    Author

    Italo Calvino

    Italo Calvino nació en 1923 en Santiago de las Vegas (Cuba). A los dos años la familia regresó a Italia para instalarse en San Remo (Liguria). Publicó su primera novela animado por Cesare Pavese, quien le introdujo en la prestigiosa editorial Einaudi. Allí desempeñaría una importante labor como editor. De 1967 a 1980 vivió en París. Murió en 1985 en Siena, cerca de su casa de vacaciones, mientras escribía Seis propuestas para el próximo milenio. Con la lúcida mirada que le convirtió en uno de los escritores más destacados del siglo XX, Calvino indaga en el presente a través de sus propias experiencias en la Resistencia, en la posguerra o desde una observación incisiva del mundo contemporáneo; trata el pasado como una genealogía fabulada del hombre actual y convierte en espacios narrativos la literatura, la ciencia y la utopía.

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    Reviews for The Nonexistent Knight

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Calvino is one of those authors I always come to slightly nervously, knowing he's going to be difficult and experimental, but then have to laugh at myself because I should have remembered from the last five or six times how much fun "difficult and experimental" becomes when he's in charge of it. This particular one is, as we should all know, the missing link between Orlando furioso and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Agilulfo is the most perfect knight in Charlemagne's army. Brave, reliable, immaculately clean, a model of efficiency and a walking encyclopaedia of the rules of chivalry, the only knight in the army who finds inspecting regimental kitchens as interesting and rewarding as smiting the infidel. Oddly enough, he doesn't seem to have many friends... And even more oddly, he doesn't appear to exist. When he lifts the visor of his spotless white suit of armour, it turns out that there's no-one inside it.But then there's the irrepressibly keen young Rambaldo, raised on tales of chivalry (which did not have anything to say about the administration of regimental kitchens and the proper way to make cabbage soup) and out to avenge his father's death at the hands of the Moors; the enigmatic amazon-warrior Bradamante (with the messiest tent in the army) who lusts after the efficient Agilulfo from inside her suit of armour; young Torrismondo who isn't quite who he says he is; and Agilulfo's unusual squire Gurdulú, who isn't quite sure what species he belongs to. And finally, there's Sister Theodora who is writing all this down for us as a penance imposed by the Abbess, and who for all we know may be making some or all of it up. Particularly the bit where she herself is carried off into the action...Calvino is obviously playing around with ideas of identity and how we define it to ourselves, as well as doing his usual thing of undermining our trust in the narrator, but he's also having fun with our perception of what the Age of Chivalry was like, by reminding us that Charlemagne's army must have been an actual army, with all the practical needs and administrative headaches that armies have in the real world. Roland and the rest wouldn't have been able to do glorious battle without all the farriers and saddlers and armourers and makers of cabbage soup, and somewhere or other there must have been room for boring staff officers with rulebooks to make sure that everyone was in the right place at the right time. Which is probably an insight that has something to do with Calvino's own experience as a communist partisan during the war. His rather less-than-Wagnerian view of the Knights of the Grail also has a distinctly World War II flavour to it...
    • 3/5
      I haven't read any Calvino but If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, and that was many years ago. I've been meaning to read more for a while, and this book looked so charming that I just had to pick it up.I have to say, I was a little bit disappointed. The knight character didn't exist, so it isn't like you could be drawn into the story by empathy for him, most of the other characters hardly felt original (partly the point, yes, I know), there was a castle filled with sex-starved ladies that felt more like a Monty Python sketch than anything else, the bit with the nun turning out to be one of the characters from the story was obvious from a mile off, and while the whole deal with the Knights of the Round Table was certainly... different, I had no idea how to feel about it. Was it supposed to be clever? Satirical? Funny? Ironic? I finished the book with a feeling of "well..."There were some clever bits, and some ways that it was clear that Calvino was poking some fun at some knights and chivalry tropes, but then the book ends with a rape (I'm sorry, but if the woman you're having sex with thinks you're someone else, and wouldn't have consented if she knew your identity, that's rape.) and then the woman falling in love with her rapist. Ugh.
    • 5/5
      Calvino is the man. This little book is a story about story-telling, but really it's about Life and Being. And it's actually fun and funny! I think I'm gonna re-read it right away.As always, story, structure and theme are one. This is the way it's done Larsson! (sorry, had to get that dig in, even though the poor guy is dead (Larsson I mean), and I just read that all he did was drink coffee and smoke, which explains a lot...)Anyway if you want a fun little medieval adventure story that will tell you all about modern life, read this!