Our Ancestors: The Cloven Viscount. Baron in the Trees. The Non-existent Knight (Picador) - Softcover

Calvino, Italo; Colquhoun, Archibald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330261568 ISBN 13: 9780330261562

Publisher: Pan Macmillan, 1980

Synopsis

A triptych of moral tales, including, Viscount Medardo who is bisected by a Turkish cannonball on the plains of Bohemia; Baron Cosimo, who at the age of twelve retires to the trees for the rest of his days and Charlemagne's knight, Agnulf, who is an empty suit of armour. By the author of MR PALOMAR and INVISIBLE CITIES.

About this title

About the Author:

Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923. He grew up in Italy. He was an essayist and journalist and a member of the editorial staff of Einaudi in Turin. In 1973 he won the prestigious Premio Feltrinelli. He died in 1985.

Review:

"Italo Calvino has advanced far beyond his American and English contemporaries, as they continue to look for the place where the spiders make their nests, Calvino has not only found that special place but learnt how himself to make fantastic webs of prose to which all things adhere" -- Gore Vidal "Reading Calvino, you're constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before.This is highly unnerving: fortunately you're usually too busy laughing to go mad... I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends" -- Salman Rushdie "The writing is just breathtaking and the final story, 'The Non-Existent Knight', still sends a shiver up my spine" -- Jilly Cooper "Calvino's genius lies not so much in this tantalising conceit, but the brilliance and ingenuity with which he pulls it off...A dazzling display of literary fireworks" * Independent * "Calvino's refusal to be glum set him apart from other modernists. His marvellous Fifties trilogy, Our Ancestors, brought us allegorical fables about a cloven viscount, a non-existent knight and a baron who swings from the trees" * Guardian *

About this edition

• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Publication date: 1980
• ISBN 10: 0330261568
• ISBN 13: 9780330261562
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 393