viscount split in half

One of Italo Calvino's "Our Ancestors" trilogy. The "Our Ancestors" trilogy includes: "The Nonexistent Knight", "The Viscount Divided in Two", and "The Baron on the Tree". These three stories represent the three stages leading to freedom and the experience of how people realize themselves. : Struggle for survival in "Non-Existent Knights", seek a whole life free from society's ravages in "The Viscount Divided in Two", and there is a path to wholeness in "The Baron on the Tree" - this is through Impersonal integrity achieved through a deliberate effort towards one's own self-determination. As "open" novels, these three stories first follow the development logic of the characters, and will start their new lives in the process of unexpected questions and answers triggered by readers. They are the ancestral genealogies of modern man, and in each face there is something of the people around us: it is as much the author's as it is the reader's.