Here’s a book that has been constructed around a single idea – a gimmick, even.

A group of travellers take refuge for the night in a castle. They find themselves inexplicably mute, so they use a deck of tarot cards to tell each other their stories.

Tarot cards communicate concepts and ideas, not facts, so each one can be interpreted in many different ways. In the book, cards acquire different meanings depending on their setting, so the various narrators reuse the same sequences of cards to tell their different stories. The end result is a single tapestry of cards that tells all their stories using the whole deck of cards.

The idea is clever, and it’s interesting to see Calvino generate ever more fanciful adventures out of very little. It is really no different from what any fortune-teller does, but in fictional form there are fewer limits on where the cards and the interpreter’s imagination can take the story.

Some stories are based on legends and tales such as those of Helen of Troy, Hamlet, Oedipus etc. Others are wild and surreal flights of fancy, full of vampires, grave robbers, apocalypses and demons.

On the whole, I thought the gimmick dominated the story-telling. This is like one of those experimental creative writing exercises, where the writer sets himself a strict constraint, and sees what sort of story that leads to. Experiments of that kind are generally more useful to the writer than they are enjoyable for the audience. Calvino himself says in the afterword that he was obsessed with this idea of generating all the stories that could be contained in a tarot deck, and that he published this book to be free of it. It shows. I doubt that a writer without his reputation could have gotten this published at all.