Tuesday, 15 September 2015

Il Visconte Dimezzato – Italo Calvino



My second favourite novel from Calvino’s Ancestors trilogy. I read it as a 13 year old who struggled to find any stimulus in literature, strongly pushed by my dad, much like he had been at the same age (and with the same set of books) by his best friend.

I’ve always thought, and I still do, that I didn’t really read the book the way it was meant to be read. Not liking allegoric and metaphoric works, I just read the novel as a funny short story about a viscount whose body gets split by a cannon ball and whose two halves have very different personalities.

I wonder how I would feel about re-reading the book now, and I also wonder whether I should have read all of Calvino’s books (in particular the ones I didn’t particularly like) using the approach highlighted above, since it definitely seemed to work.  

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