Italo Calvino

"A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their tales. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal, and chaotic history of all human consciousness."--Goodreads

The Castle of Crossed Destinies

Novel Ideas

Surely my own story is also contained in this pattern of cards, my past, present, and future, but I can no longer distinguish it from the others. The forest, the castle, tarots have brought me to this point, where I have lost my story, confused it in the dust of the tales, become freed of it. 

 We are all trying to explain something to the others with gestures, grimaces, all of us like monkeys. Thank God, there are these cards, here on the table, a deck of tarots, the most ordinary kind.

There is no better place to keep a secret than in an unfinished novel.

But, at the same time, believing: in that way that painters and witers have of believing in a story that has gone through many forms, and with painting and repainting, writing and rewriting, if it was not true, has become so.

The Castle of Crossed Destinies quotes

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