HARVARD GAZETTE ARTICLE | That’s a book?

Faculty, staff offer recommendations for side trips off the beaten path
Every book is a doorway into another world, and some worlds are weirder than others. We asked members of the campus community to recommend a few that expand our notions of what literature can be.

A novel told in tarot “The Castle of Crossed Destinies” by Italo Calvino

A half-century before the advent of LLMs, Italo Calvino was experimenting with the use of combinatory and computational systems for crafting new literary works.

The automation of writing, he speculated, could open up powerful new horizons of literary expression as machines became increasingly capable of bringing to the page “all those things that we are accustomed to consider as the most jealously guarded attributes of our psychological life, of our daily experience, our unpredictable changes of mood and inner elations, despairs and moments of illumination.The novel is divided into two sections: “The Castle of Crossed Destinies” (which takes place in a medieval castle and is built around the mid-15th-century Visconti-Sforza tarot) and “The Tavern of Crossed Destinies” (which occurs in a Renaissance inn and is built around the 17th-century Marseille tarot).
Calvino thought of adding a contemporary, post-apocalyptic coda to the book, titled “The Motel of Crossed Destinies,” generated by remixing fragments of comic strips and popular magazines, but never brought the project to fruition.
— Jeffrey Schnapp, Carl A. Pescosolido Chair in Romance and Comparative Literatures, founder of MetaLAB (at) Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society

Full Article