Our Ancestors Trilogy

Three novellas Calvino published between 1952 and 1959, each organized around a single fantastical premise held with rigorous consistency. In The Cloven Viscount, a nobleman is split in two by a cannonball, and the halves — one good, one evil — live separately, each incomplete. In The Baron in the Trees, Cosimo climbs into a tree at twelve and never descends, living his entire life in the canopy. In The Nonexistent Knight, a suit of armor fights in Charlemagne's army, perfectly valiant and perfectly empty — there is no one inside. The trilogy is Calvino's mature demonstration that philosophical inquiry can be conducted through the rigorous elaboration of impossible premises, and that the impossible premise — the constraint — is not a limitation on seriousness but the condition of it.