Semiotic fantasy novel by Italo Calvino, published in Italian in 1973 as Il castello dei destini incrociati. It consists of a series of short tales gathered into two sections, The Castle of Crossed Destinies and The Tavern of Crossed Destinies. The novel concerns two groups of travelers through a forest, both of which have lost the power to speak as the result of traumatic events. One group is spending the night in a tavern, the other in a castle. In each place, the travelers tell the stories of their lives, using tarot cards instead of words. A narrator at each place interprets the cards for the reader, but since the tarot cards are subject to multiple interpretations, the stories the narrators offer are not necessarily the stories intended by the mute storytellers. A customer of Amazon.com wrote the following. Of the four books I have read by Calvino (all to be highly recommended for anyone who does not wish to be allowed to read passively, and who also is looking for something that will "delight in the re-reading", as well as the surprise in the new), "Castle" most adopts a particular structure to present a tale of shifting identities, as do his other novels. Knowledge of the Canterbury Tales is helpful, but Calvino makes sure it sits in the background and does not dominate his readings. I use "readings", if you must know, because this is the strucutre of the novel-a series of tarot card readings of a group of travelers who stop in this castle. The stories are wonderful, in the proud Italian tradition of Boccacio, Petrarch, and Chaucer(who learned all he could from his Italian masters), and his modern master Borges, and the framing device, is interesting and used subtly and skillfully. If you don't have questions about the nature of narratives and fictions, and about the way those answers implicate how a human subject understands reality or comes to it, "Castle" may not be for you, as you may get bogged down in its introverted labyrinthine reflections. If Borges' metaphysical fairy tales are your cup of tea, it here runneth over. A reader , December 3, 1996 -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.