A traveler takes shelter in a castle where an enchanted forest has struck all the guests mute, so they can only tell their life stories by laying out and pointing to tarot cards from a shared deck, producing tangled, overlapping tales—an ingrate's punishment, an alchemist's bargain, a doomed bride, a grave-robber, Roland driven mad with love, Astolpho's flight to the moon—that the narrator and others must piece together from the spread; a second part, 'The Tavern of Crossed Destinies,' repeats the device with a different deck, and a closing note describes Calvino's own struggle to construct both sections as a 'machine for constructing stories' out of the tarot images.
Books mentioned in The Castle of Crossed Destinies (6)
Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto: “The central axes of this pattern present episodes inspired by the Orlando Furioso of Lodovico ("The Tale of Roland Crazed with Love" and "The Tale of Astolpho on the Moon").”
Hamlet by William Shakespeare: “recognizes the platform before Elsinore castle when the night's blackness falls; his mother has surprised him (The Lover!) raving for Ophelia.”
Macbeth by William Shakespeare: “His chariot advances at the head of the English army, and finally Macbeth is forced to say: I 'gin to be aweary of The Sun, and wish the syntax o' The World were now undone.”
King Lear by William Shakespeare: “the daughter he failed to understand and unjustly drove out while lending credence to the lying treachery of Regan and Goneril.”
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “So the story of Doctor Faust mingles also with that of King Midas, in the card of the Ace of Coins, which portrays the terrestrial globe turned into a sphere of solid gold.”
Don Juan Tenorio by José Zorrilla: “Now the tempter shows him the Arcanum of Love, in which the story of Faust is mingled with that of Don Juan Tenorio, also surely concealed within the network of the tarots.”
Books that mention The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1)
Italo Calvino by Martin McLaughlin: “The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) reworks Ariosto's Orlando furioso along with major myths of Western literature”