Predvojeni vikont
The Biscounted Viscount is a novel by Italo Calvino published in 1952. It is the first part of the Our Ancestors trilogy, which also includes the short novels The Baron in the Trees from 1957 and The Nonexistent Knight from 1959.
Set in Bohemia and Italy, more precisely in Liguria between the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, at the time of the Austro-Turkish war (1683-1699), Calvin's novel sets as its central theme the problem of a modern man (an intellectual, more precisely) who is split in half, i.e. split in half, into two parts. Precisely for this purpose, the protagonist is cut in half (by a cannon ball) along the fault line of good and evil, building a kind of metaphor for the whole story that symbolizes good and evil, the incompleteness of man and the possible states of the human spirit. Therefore, it could be defined as a philosophical novel. Other characters are lepers (ie decadent artists), a doctor of dubious ability (Trelawney) and a carpenter (Pietrochiodo), who represent the science and technology present in humanity.
One copy is available