If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

You are reading a book which opens with the line, “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller,” and you think, sigh, metafiction. But this is Italo Calvino, and so you take the advice Calvino offers: “Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought”– Hang on, every other? How will you know which ones to dispel and which ones to keep? And yet, it is perhaps sound advice as you read about a reader who reads a book only for his reading to be cut short, and when he goes looking for a complete copy of the novel he was reading he discovers he had been reading an entirely different book altogether… And at the book shop he meets a young woman who is also interested in this show more literary mystery he has uncovered, and together they discover yet a third novel mixed in with the previous two. But then he meets the young woman’s sister and becomes involved in her schemes… and at some point both young women end up in one of the narratives you are reading about him reading… And yet despite this literary shell game, where the narrative peas seem to proliferate out of sight under the cups, the whole is intensely readable and not in the slightest bit confusing. In parts it reminded me of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, although without the prissiness. It certainly convinced me I should read more Calvino – If on a winter’s night a traveller may be one long literary trick, but it’s gloriously done. Bravo. show less

A real labyrinth of a novel. Calvino explores what it means to be a writer and delves into the heads of his readers at the same time. The conceit of this novel is beautifully executed with precision, humour, and amazing insight.

If On A Winter's Night A Traveller is a metatextual novel about a reader attempting to read a book of the same title. At each turn he is frustrated by incomplete volumes, forced to seek out the next only to find that it is an entirely different book, and so the novel consists of an ongoing march of interrupted stories. It was a primary inspiration for David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which is my favourite book of all time.

I hated this book. Hated it. I originally had it on my pile because it was the inspiration for Cloud Atlas, but shuffled it up the rank after reading this interesting retrospective piece by Mitchell himself. Although finding his opinion on it had changed somewhat since he was a younger man, he still found it to be an show more excellent and important novel.

I'll be blunt. The problem with If On A Winter's Night A Traveller is that Calvino's writing style is ponderously complex and tedious. It shits me to tears. Here is a random sample paragraph for you to enjoy.

Reading is a discontinuous and fragmentary operation. Or, rather, the object of reading is a punctiform and pulviscular material. In the spreading expanse of the writing, the reader's attention isolates some minimal segments, juxtapositions of words, metaphors, syntactic nexuses, logical passages, lexical pecularities that prove to possess an extremely concentrated density of meaning. They are like elemental particles making up the work's nucleus, around which all the rest revolves.

It goes on and on like that. I can't be bothered transcribing any more. Suffice to say that not since Haruki Murakami's "Kafka On The Shore" (another author Mitchell admires, oddly enough) have I actually told a book, out loud, to shut up.

Mitchell claims, in his reflection, that the book features "twelve manuscripts written in the style of a Bogart movie, Chekhov, a spaghetti western, Mishima, and so on." I didn't see it. Unlike Mitchell, who has a breathtakingly brilliant mastery of different styles, genres and narrative voices, I didn't see any change in Calvino's style at all - just one long slog through a frustratingly boring landscape of metatextual postmodern bullshit. The word that would usually come to mind is "pretentious" (or, to be less polite, "wanky") but I have little doubt that Calvino actually understands and enjoys all the abstract concepts he endlessly blathers about. I'm not ashamed to say that I don't.

I hated this novel. It's a perfect example of a book that I disliked reading so much I was reluctant to pick it up, thus stretching out the time it took to finish it and prolonging my misery. I found it quite surprising that David Mitchell - a writer who is so wonderfully complex yet enjoyably readable - loved it. I suppose there's no accounting for taste. (Somebody who loves Calvino and can't stand Mitchell is reading this and rolling their eyes.) show less

Some may call Calvino’s device a gimmick and even a bit lazy, but I thought it was rather refreshing. There’s a lot of metatextual criticism here, making this book is great for those who like The Arabian Nights or Borges’s short fiction or David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. The act of creating infinitely intertwining narratives that both propel one plotline and stunt another requires a deft hand. There are but two deficiencies with this work: the dialogue is always a bit stilted and the very nature of second-person storytelling precludes you from getting inside the head of the other characters to know their motivations. But, I suppose, that is the price we pay for being individuals. It is a difficult read, but ultimately worthwhile show more if you’re looking to shake things up a bit.

http://lifelongdewey.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/853-if-on-a-winters-night-a-travel... show less

A book for every reader who likes to think about reading! A tour de force about the role of fiction, the function of writers, and especially the act of reading. It's also the only book I can think of that is successfully told primarily in the second person.

It has the best first chapter I've ever read. Here's a delightful passage:

"You have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The show more Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too." show less

Summary: A reader purchases a book only to find most of it is missing and seeks the rest of the story.

Imagine you have just visited your favorite bookstore and spot an intriguing book, If on a winter’s night a traveler. You get home, curl up in your easy chair, get drawn into the story and then find the remaining pages are scramble and cannot read any more.

And so you go back to the store to exchange it for another copy. While there, you meet a fellow booklover, Ludmilla, looking for the same book. The books are replace but you find it is a different story by a different author. You and Ludmilla team up to track down the conclusion of the story and your quest takes you through lit seminars, a love affair, an encounter with a scam show more translator, a book fraud conspiracy, and a frustrated author. An each of the “replacements” is the beginning of a different story, written by different author in a different genre.

That’s Calvino’s novel in a nutshell. After an opening chapter on the nature of reading, something we readers rarely reflect upon, the “story” proceed by first addressing you, the reader, and the lead protagonist in the “frame story” followed by the broken-off story.

Toward the end, a character strings together the titles of the ten stories, discovering it forms a kind of a sentence:

If on a winter’s night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave— What story down there awaits its end?—he asks, anxious to hear the story.

What to make of all this? To begin with, Calvino makes the reader the real protagonist. So often, readers are anonymous in the background. Instead, Calvino’s readers quest for stories, really the story. And might that be the case in our world? Is the real story what we make of and how we connect the various pieces of stories?

Alternatively, I wondered if Calvino simply found a way to string together ten stories he couldn’t finish! If so, it was among the most successful cases of writer’s block in history!

Perhaps Calvino meant a wake-up call to the indifferent or jaded reader, addressed in his opening;

“It’s not that you expect anything in particular from this particular book. You’re the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences, from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you…”

To read Calvino, at least this story is to evoke a reaction. Either you throw the book across the room with disgust. Or you become engrossed with this quirky, somewhat absurd tale around the ten stories. And perhaps that’s what Calvino wanted.

I’ll leave it for you to decide. show less

If ever there was a book written expressly towards my interests and ability, If on a winter's night a traveler is one. Someone mentioned it to me years ago, possibly when I was still in university, or maybe during one of the early SantaThings, and I stuck it on my To Read list. It lingered there for quite some time, until the book I planned to take on vacation got lost and I needed a last minute substitution from the library. I no longer remembered the particulars of the novel or why I had put it on my TBR list, and so had no real expectations or anticipations for what I was about to read when I finally opened If on a winter's night a traveler at the pool.

I love novelists who play with reader's expectations, whether through language or show more structure, so while I was a bit bemused at the first page or two with the second-person pov, I quickly found myself completely delighted with the structure of the story - and also the book itself: it's all about the acts of reading, writing, and the relationship between author and readers or between readers themselves. The primary method of looking at these subjects is through alternating chapters wherein a narrative grows around The Reader You (who is trying to read Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, just as the out-of-book reader is doing) and the beginnings of novels he encounters.

One thread I found intriguing, and which I will need to reread the book to have a better understanding, is of the "truth" or "reality" of books and the author. There is a question of authenticity - is it the "real" book the author wrote? can the book in the author's mind be accurately transmitted to the reader? and if not, which one is the real book? what happens when you add translations to the mix? if someone copies a writer's style and forges their name such that no one would know it's a forgery, does it have any worth as a real book or is it worthless as a fake? - which ultimately leads to the dual question "what is reality, and who creates it?"

I believe chapter 8 might be the pivot of the book. It is possibly the most 'meta' of any chapter and is the first to plainly link the inside book to the outside book, a sort of literary möbius strip. It's a multi-layered möbius, in fact, because it also brings the some of the previous novel beginnings into the reality of The Reader's narrative, and is the point when I felt The Reader's narrative shifted to mingle with the novel beginnings. At any rate, chapter 8 is when I sat up and said "wait a second, how did Calvino know exactly what to write to reach my heart?" - so many aspects felt exactly written to appeal to the kinds of things I like to read and to challenge my brain with, even when they were elements that stretched my comfort zone. It is playful and quietly satirical in spots, but also serious and weighty. It deconstructs the entire concept of "book", but also celebrates it.

I can't possibly give a succinct overview of this book beyond what I've written here, nor can I recommend it to just anyone. It's not an easy read, and it's going to be too weird or postmodern for loads of people. But it is exactly to my taste, and I love it tremendously, and I am so glad I finally borrowed a copy. (And now that I've just finished reading it, I'm craving a reread of other postmodern writers on my shelf - Borges and Cortazar and Rushdie...) show less