I have been reading works by Italo Calvino (1923 to 1985) for sometime. About five years ago I purchased Our Ancestors, a collection of three novellas by Calvino on sale for 200 PHP. With the reading of The Non-Existent Knight, set in the time of Charlemagne, I have finished the book. It is very much modernist magic realism with a heavy dose of meta-fiction and more than a dash of whimsy thrown in. The central "character" is a non-existent knight inhabiting a suit of armor. Calvino in a preface written for Our Ancestors says you can read The Non-Existent Knight as an existentialist, a Jungian, a Freudian, a neo-Kantian or a structuralist or other ways or you can just enjoy it.
I did enjoy this book and am for now going to leave it at that. Calvino is a very self aware writer, watching himself tell a story and this idea is played with in The Non-Existent Knight.
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