The Cloven Viscount

1. Calvino admitted that he wrote this romanzo "almost for fun," and that he was "not prepared for the outcry that greeted it." His idea of fun: to thrust a character into the middle of a war between Christians and Turks and have a cannonball fired "right in his chest," splitting him into the novelist's own Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Later the two halves would fall in love almost inevitably with the same woman, leading to their reunion in the end, but only after a bloody duel & a few people's intervention--a closure that was almost bound to happen yet I wished the novelist avoided, even if only to arrive at an ending that was as disagreeable as the premise.

2. Now I could understand an outcry, but more for its narrative discontentment, rather than for what it actually contains. Perhaps Calvino was aware of this, and so he sent away Dr. Trelawney, with whom our young narrator "found a companion such as [he] never had," aboard Captain Cook's ship, while the boy, who also happened to be the viscount's nephew, was "deep in the wood telling [himself] stories."

~ After Italo Calvino's The Cloven Viscount (1952)