The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino
Published 1952 · 1 pages · 28,000 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Fable, Literary Fiction, Fantasy
How hard is The Cloven Viscount to read?
The Cloven Viscount scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 40 out of 100
- Fable diction: clear, quick, concrete. Colquhoun's translation adds only the vocabulary of seventeenth-century warfare, leprosy and Huguenot religion.
- Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
- Brisk narrative sentences in the rhythm of oral storytelling, with lists and repetitions doing the structural work.
- Abstraction: 64 out of 100
- A philosophical fable about whether goodness separated from its opposite is any use, delivered entirely through halved fruit and a child narrator who reports rather than reflects.
- Information density: 38 out of 100
- Short, fast and light on background. The Turkish wars, the lepers' colony and the Huguenot settlement are sketched in a few strokes each.
- Narrative indirection: 54 out of 100
- A nephew narrates from childhood, mostly reporting what he saw or was told, and never states the fable's meaning. The interpretation is left entirely to the reader.
- Symbolic density: 86 out of 100
- The book is a single sustained allegory. Every halved object, the seam, the two cloaks, the lepers who sing and the Huguenots who forgot their liturgy, all point at the same idea from different angles.
- Ironic distance: 74 out of 100
- The Good Half is more insufferable than the Bad, virtue is shown to be as destructive as cruelty when it operates alone, and the happy ending is announced by a narrator who then says he was left out of the wholeness.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- Medardo is reassembled and the village settles, but the narrator ends by saying he was left with a world of ties and duties in which he did not know what he was, so the reunification resolves nothing for him.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Linear and short, with a first-person child narrator framing a story mostly outside his own experience.
How The Cloven Viscount is regarded
The Cloven Viscount holds a literary regard score of 74 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.