Word: tarot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...puffed upon his underslung pipe. "When I see a man shuffling a tarot deck, certain conclusions become manifest - the first of which is that you are wasting your time with occult twaddle...
Kent Quander '79, one of the two occupants of the suite, said he was upstairs in a friend's room "reading tarot cards" when he heard the fire alarm...
Idea: a novel in which all of the characters have been struck mute. The only way they can communicate is through the pictures and symbols on a pack of tarot cards. That seems the borrowed inspiration of a green writer who has been rifling Borges or Nabokov-a novelist who depends on conjury, not creativity. Yet the tarot notion comes from Italian Fabulist Italo Calvino, 53, who has been producing such chimerical conceptions in his books for over 30 years. What is more important, he has consistently fleshed them out in original, whimsical and unsettling ways...
...host presents a tarot pack, the set painted by Bonifacio Bembo for Milanese nobility in the 15th century. (The book includes eight color reproductions of the cards and a running marginal commentary of black-and-white illustrations.) Each guest seeks his story in the 78-card deck - an allegorical pageant of wands, coins, swords, clubs and human figures. As the cards are turned face up, some famous identities make their entrances...
This time, both the guests and their setting (a tavern) are seedier. So are the cards, the so-called Marseille tarots first printed in the 18th century. More mythic figures appear among the guests, but the stories also take on sooty overtones of industrialism and hints of the modern totalitarian state. The author seeks his own story in the pack. "Perhaps," he ventures, "the moment has come to admit that only tarot number one honestly depicts what I have succeeded in being: a juggler, or conjurer, who arranges on a stand at a fair a certain number of objects...