Rating: 
Summary: The Cloven Viscount is brilliant!
Review: Viscount Medardo of Terralba has ridden across the plain of Bohemia to join the war against the Turks. When battle commences, he flings himself into the mêlée. Young and foolish, he attacks a Turkish cannon from the front and receives a cannonball in the chest. His left half is completely blown away. After dusk, during a truce, his remains are gathered up and operated on by the surgeons. Miraculously, they are able to save his right half; now he is "alive and cloven".Thus begins Calvino's first fantasy, one of the most highly imaginative and amusing of his modern fables. Published in Italy in 1951, The Cloven Viscount was Calvino's attempt at writing the sort of book he would like to read himself, the sort of book "by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic." Until then, Calvino had practised realism, charting postwar upheaval and social concerns in his native country. Yet The Cloven Viscount seems to have more to say about the human condition in times of crisis than his earlier works. For example, the nature of good and evil and the incompleteness of the soul are themes explored here in depth. But The Cloven Viscount is not a straightforward allegory or purely symbolic text. Calvino was pleased that the meanings of his tales were "always a little uncertain" and that "no single key will turn all their locks." Leaning heavily on a crutch, the Viscount returns home and starts causing mischief. It soon becomes clear that it is the bad half of the Viscount that has survived. He begins to terrify the local peasants with his cruel and spiteful acts, spending much of his time cutting in half everything he can get his hands on. It is his wish, he confesses, to "halve every whole thing... as there's beauty and knowledge and justice only in what's been cut to shreds." The narrator, the Viscount's nephew, does his best to stay out of his uncle's way. Together with Dr Trelawney, an alcoholic scientist, he wanders graveyards at night, looking for wills-o'-the wisp. It is Dr Trelawney's ambition to capture one in a bottle. Yet the Viscount spares no efforts in attempting to murder the pair of them and the rest of the population, aided in his nefarious schemes by Master Pietrochiodo, a carpenter cursed with a genius for constructing unusual apparatus of torture and execution. The reign of terror is only threatened when the Viscount's other half turns up. Tended by necromancers after the battle, this other half has been travelling across the land, performing good deeds. The Bad 'Un and the Good 'Un, as they are respectively known, constantly try to outdo each other. Ironically, the Good 'Un manages to cause as much trouble as the Bad 'Un. With its wealth of invention, peculiar ideas and extraordinary insights, The Cloven Viscount paved the way for Calvino's more mature work. Like Baron in the Trees and The Non-Existent Knight, books with which it forms a loose triptych, The Cloven Viscount began as a single image; the image of a man cut in two but still alive. It was this image alone which dictated the development of the story. Calvino is rightly regarded as the author of some of the most wildly creative imaginative fiction in Europe. The Cloven Viscount shows where it all began.
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