[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. There is a society of people who live on the ground, and a society of people who live on trees, imagined by the hero, Cosimo…. Cosimo has chosen arboreal life for two reasons. He states the first one clearly when asked about his choice of such an uncomfortable abode: 'From the trees I can piss farther.' As for the second reason, it is the obvious appeal for duplication. The specular reflection of life on earth reproduced higher up, among branches and foliage, turns into reality. Cosimo, like Alice, is stepping through the mirror.
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