The Cloven Viscount

Calvino's delightfully absurd and macabre novella about the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball and the separate paths they forge, exploring the duality of good and evil.

What is the relationship between good and evil? Can both exist at once, or is one the absence of the other? In a battle against the Turks, the Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bisected vertically 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, determined to love an impossibly good existence. Both set out on their own independent adventures, but when the two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, there’s no telling the lengths each will go to win. From a master of magical realism, his bizarre story is Calvino at his most devious and insightful, spinning a powerful parable about the complexities of human morality.

"The reason Calvino is such an indispensable writer is precisely that he tells us, joyfully, wickedly, that there are things in the world worth loving as well as hating; and that such things exist in people, too. I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while the world ends." —Salman Rushdie

"The reason Calvino is such an indispensable writer is precisely that he tells us, joyfully, wickedly, that there are things in the world worth loving as well as hating; and that such things exist in people, too. I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while the world ends." - Salman Rushdie

"Calvino is a wizard." - New York Review of Books

"Italo Calvino was, word for word, the most charming writer to put pen to paper in the twentieth century." - The New Yorker