The second story involves a viscount who gets torn in half by a cannonball while fighting the Ottoman Turk Italo Calvino is a brilliant comic writer, and I love reading his tales, which seem plucked from the Italian countryside. His love scenes, creaking in full, hollow armor, are quite funny. He's not afraid to be bizarre, too, as in the first story, which recounts the exploits of an animate suit of armor in Charlemagne's army-so dignified and courteous, yet ambivalent of his own nonexistence. Italo Calvino is a brilliant comic writer, and I love reading his tales, which seem plucked from the Italian countryside. This is all part of a trilogy that is sometimes called 'Our Ancestors' which includes the equally wonderful 'The Baron In The Trees'. He hops around his homeland, administering violence, halving things with his sword so that they resemble himself. A man's cruel side survives being separated from the rest of himself by cannonball. 'The Cloven Viscount' is a more gruesome story. Without a doubt, this story has the funniest seduction in the history of literature, involving a lusty noblewoman who lures knights to her castle via staged bear attack, who then proceeds to make love to a man who doesn't exist, a suit of armor that spends most of the time moving the bed for the right light. He sits at table with other knights, mincing his food into neat rows that he stacks and reorganizes, shifting wine from glass to glass, constantly ordering clean plates, all because he has no mouth or stomach with which to eat, and all the while correcting his knighted colleagues. Just thinking of this character's precision makes me smile.
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