SOURCE: “Calvino's Fantastic ‘Ancestors’: the Viscount, the Baron and the Knight,” in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 6, No. 2, Summer, 1986, pp. 45–9.

In the following essay, Byrne contends that “controversial though the tales may be, Our Ancestors makes an important contribution to modern literature.”

“I believe that fables are true.”

Italo Calvino

Calvino is dead and that's also true, but his “ancestors” live on and we are their heirs. The no-longer cloven viscount, Medardo of Terralba, lives with his Pamela and her goat and duck; Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, like Icarus before him, lies in the vasty deep (“Those are pearls that were his eyes”); and Agilulf, the nonexistent knight, no longer encumbered by his weighty armor, wanders the earth as pure spirit motivated only by the power of his will. Excellent company for the little boy who, like Matthew Arnold's Sophocles, “saw life steadily and saw it whole...