Flash Friday: The Cloven Viscount -- Italo Calvino

Calvino's delightfully absurd and macabre novella about the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball and the separate paths they forge, exploring the duality of good and evil.

In a battle against the Turks, the Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bisected vertically by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears, determined to love an impossibly good existence. Both set out on their own independent adventures, but when the two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, there’s no telling the lengths each will go to win. From a master of magical realism, his bizarre story is Calvino at his most devious and insightful, spinning a powerful parable about the complexities of human morality.