Reading Games and Playing Books: Game, Play and Storytelling

Abstract

The traveller in Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies begins his series of strange tales with an even stranger description of how they were narrated to him. In a castle, where some unknown power had rendered everyone speechless, the guests were still telling each other their stories but they were doing so in a rather unique way. The traveller describes a scene where tarot cards were laid out after the banquet and what followed thereafter:

One of the guests drew the scattered [tarot] cards to himself, leaving a large part of the table clear; […] We all noticed the resemblance between his face and the face on the card, […] and that he was preparing to tell his story. (Calvino, 1979, p. 6)