[From] a very early stage in his career Calvino seeme to have been daunted by geometric compulsions…. The minute details of his plots, the main events of his stories, the structure of his novels, even the most extravagant flights of his imagination are always arranged in a binary literary order. In the first Goyesque chapter of The Cloven Viscount … the massacre is presented in geometric patterns: here the dead horses, there the dead men. The Viscount is cloven by a cannon ball into two Stevensonian halves: the bad one v the good one. The bad half, among other pleasures, delights in orgies of collective hangings, which however present geometrical patterns: ten cats hanging alternate with two human beings. (p. 61)

The Cloven Viscount is the first instalment of a trilogy called Our Ancestors. The second volume, The Baron in the Trees, also follows a neat division of the world...