Ova knjiga o knjigama i čitanju je najoriginalnija knjiga koju sam pročitao. I verovatno najbolje delo o literaruri. Mnogo je tu eksperimentisanja, počevši od toga da je sastavljena od deset početaka romana koji se odjednom prekidaju, do toga da tih deset priča prati deset poglavlja povezane priče u kojima učestvuješ ti, Čitaoče. Ceo taj deo je sjajno napisan u drugom licu. Dodaj sjajan humor Kalvina, i Ako jedne zimske noći... postaje moderni klasik.

Iako su prekinute priče različitog nivoa kvaliteta (čitajući ih, neke su mi izazivale nelagodan osećaj nervoze) roman (?) kao celina je nešto što ću pamtiti i vratiti mu se, pretpostavljam vrlo skoro. Brzao sam da je pročitam, ali sad sam siguran da i u povezanosti tih priča postoji neka filozofija koju još nisam shvatio. Ali nema veze, neizmerno sam uživao, a biće vremena da se dodatno istražuje.

P.S. I moj primerak knjige je zamalo doživeo sudbinu "knjiga iz knjige". Suviše entuzijastično štene ritrivera je uspelo da se dočepa Kalvina i potpuno rascepa/pojede naslovnu i prvih petnaestak strana. Ne samo što me Kalvino uključio u pripovetku oslovljavajući me kroz redove, već se deo njegove pripovetke prebacio i u moj stvarni svet.

Edit 27.05.2019
Moram da dodam link ka ovom članku Dragane Labanac na Pulse.rs

В этом романе много достоинств и особенностей, вызывающих восторг литературоведов. Это и гиперроман, изобилующий ссылками и аллюзиями, и метароман с эффектом текста в тексте, наподобие картинки в картинке, воспроизводящей самое себя. Замечательно установление контакта с читателем путем использование обращения к нему во втором лице и повествование от имени не только Читателя, как персонажа, но и читателя, читающего этот роман. Зачины десяти несхожих между собой романов в совершенно разных жанрах, напоминающих стилизации в «Улиссе» Джойса вызывают легкое головокружение, а их названия, собранные вместе составляют «Если однажды зимней ночью путник, неподалёку от хутора Мальборк, над крутым косогором склонившись, не страшась ветра и головокружения, смотрит вниз, где сгущается тьма, в сети перекрещённых линий, в сети перепутанных линий, на лужайке, залитой лунным светом, вкруг зияющей ямы. — Что ждет его в самом конце? — спрашивает он, с нетерпением ожидая ответа.» Вставной эпизод с Гаруном аль-Рашидом, вытянувшим черную жемчужину, означающему что он должен убить самого себя, а если он этого не сделает, то остальные должны убить его самого – похожий пример софистического искажения логики, когда все решения сводятся к желаемому поставившему задачу. И все же несмотря на обилие литературных примечательностей, главным в романе являются размышления о книгах, читателях, восприятии, полемика вокруг того, что получает и что постигает каждый читатель.
Первый читатель говорит: «Когда книга захватывает меня, то, уловив некую мысль, чувство, вопрос или образ, содержащиеся в тексте, я отталкиваюсь от него буквально через несколько строк и перескакиваю от мысли к мысли, от образа к образу, уношусь по касательной собственных рассуждений и фантазий; я чувствую, что должен проделать этот путь до конца, отойти от книги совсем далеко, потерять ее из виду. Чтение, только чтение содержательное, необходимо мне; оно подстегивает меня, даже если в каждой книге я прочитываю всего несколько страниц. Но и эти немногие страницы составляют для меня целые вселенные, вечные и неисчерпаемые.»
Второй добавляет, что предмет чтение – «материя точечная, распыленная», сквозь словосочетания, метафоры, логические переклички, языковые перлы, плотно насыщенные смыслом, сквозь эти просветы «вспыхивают едва уловимые сполохи истины, отраженной в книге: проступает ее глубинная суть.» Его внимание приковано к печатной строке, в которой он ищет подтверждения очередному открытию.
Третий всякий раз находит в перечитываемой книге что-то новое, видя в этом изменения в себе самом, самосовершенствование, «Или чтение – это некая конструкция, которая складывается из множества переменных и не может дважды повторить тот же узор? На месте прежних впечатлений возникают совсем другие, неожиданные, а прежних как не бывало.» И в результате он приходит к выводу, что чтение – процесс беспредметный, подлинным его предметом является оно само.
Четвертый, соглашаясь с субъективностью чтения, говорит: «Всякая новая книга входит составной частью в единую, совокупную книгу. Такая книга есть сумма моих чтений. Составить ее не так просто. Для этого каждая книга в отдельности должна преобразиться, найти точки соприкосновения с прочтенными ранее книгами, стать их итогом, или развитием, или опровержением, или толкованием, или ссылкой. Годами хожу я в эту библиотеку и одолеваю ее книга за книгой, шкаф за шкафом, хотя без труда мог бы доказать вам, что, в сущности, продолжаю читать одну-единственную книгу.»

HOMAGE [PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS]:

Previously Unpublished Manuscript #1

Who am I? Who is I? Who is the I?

Unlike my friends and colleagues, Professors Calvino and Galligani, I intend to tell you my name and perhaps to reveal something of my modus operandi (soon, too).

This one sentence might already have supplied enough information or implication to let you work out or infer who I am?

Have you guessed yet? No? Well, my name is Professor Uzzi-Tuzii, though my friends call me Julian. Not only is that my name, but that is who I am.

Yes. It's true. I am Professor Uzzi-Tuzii.

See how much I have revealed about myself, see how much I have revealed about who I am, about who “I” is!

I is me. I am me. I could not be anyone else, could I? I am not and never was Italo Calvino. I am not the Reader, although it's also true I am a reader.

Nor then could I be you (as if that is not self-evident to any strict grammarian), so put an end to that speculation. It will not help you to realise anything. It will only frustrate you, which in a way was an objective of the novel "If on a winter's night a traveller".

I wish you could see the real me, sitting comfortably here on my swivel chair, on my polished timber floor, looking at my computer screen, surrounded by the music of time.

You might learn a little more about me, just by being able to see me.

To know the real me, to see the real me, might make me a sight for sore eyes. I am no eyesore (though I appeal less with age). However, I am the remedy you need for your eyesight, I promise, if you will let me, that I will heal your vision, so that you might see.

There are none so blind as those who will not see. So I will try to make you see. If you will.

What am I going on about? Perhaps, you do not believe me? Perhaps, now, as I promised, I need to explain my modus operandi?

Will the detail of my modus operandi overcome your skepticism? Will you only believe me, believe that I am I and I am me, if you know what I do? Do you honestly believe that I cannot be what I am unless I reveal what I do? Or what I did?

Oh, what unbelievers we have become.

Are you ready?

Believe me, I would tell you, I will tell you everything, if you would only believe me.

I only say this, I only make this diversion, because some do not believe me. Some believe I am unreliable. Some believe, without seeing me or knowing me, that I am an unreliable narrator.

How unfair! How hurtful! Do I deny you? No, of course, I don’t. How could I deny you? I don’t even know you. You must remain innocent, unless and until proven guilty. So I must believe in you, if I am to find you guilty.

In order to tell you what I did, there is one other thing I must tell you about who I am, or more precisely who I am not.

I am not William Weaver, I am not the translator of "If on a winter's night a traveller", the book you might be reading or would be reading if you were not reading my addendum.

That probably goes without saying, though I think it needs to be said.

I am not Ermes Marana, the translator of the fictitious book "If on a winter's night a traveller", the book within the novel "If on a winter's night a traveller".

Would it help if I explained, there is no such translator?

You might already think that he was a fiction, that he wasn’t real, that he was a figment of Italo Calvino’s imagination.

I have no doubt that, when my friend Italo learned of his apparent existence, he passed him off as a figment of his imagination. But he is, in reality (if that makes sense), a figment of my imagination, well, a figment of the imagination of those around me.

At this stage of my story, the book must be making less sense now than when I started? I apologise, yet I have to argue in my defence that this often happens during the telling of a story.

You, the reader, perhaps the Reader, have to let me get on with my story. I have to tell it at my pace, which at my age lacks apparent haste, but you have to cooperate. You have to do your bit. So, can we resume?

Perhaps, before we do so, now might be a good time to refill your glass of red or to make a cup of tea...

[Editor’s Note: The manuscript breaks off here. It is not known whether this is a piece of fiction.]



Previously Unpublished Manuscript #2

So how do I start to tell you my story?

Italo Calvino never had any such doubt. You should have seen him laugh when I told him about the line from Doctor Who, “First things first, but not necessarily in that order.”

He enjoyed starting a story at the beginning so much, he couldn’t help doing it over and over.

So I will start at the beginning, in his footsteps.

When my story, indeed your story, began, I was in my thirties and at the height of my career as an academic, author and public intellectual as they used to say in those days.

Before I met your mother, I thought I could have any woman I wanted, and I almost did.

To my great regret, I persisted in this belief after I married Maria, though it was my great good fortune that I never acted on any of my impulses.

This story partly concerns just how close I did come.

Being an author of fiction, I looked on writing as an act of love, an act of seduction. I caressed meaning out of words as I would caress a woman.

I stopped when I met your mother, well, I mean, for a while she became the exclusive focus of my thoughts and caresses. Then, six months after our wedding, at the end of the academic year, I agreed to teach a Creative Writing Course for Masters of Fine Arts students during the three month break.

For the first time in many years, there were no male students, there were only ten female students, all of them young, intelligent, attractive, and available, or so I thought at the time.

They absorbed information and guidance quickly. Each of them gazed into my eyes, as if they wanted to know the full contents of the dark pool that lay behind.

At night, while I caressed your mother skillfully, if not lovingly enough, I could only think of these other temptations.

They progressed so well in their studies that we soon came to their practical exercise. Each of them was to write the first chapter of a novel that they would finish after the course.

I selfishly came up with the idea of the subject matter, and every one of them agreed compliantly. They would write in the first person, and that first person would be me. They would appear in the chapter under their first name. And each chapter would feature an object that would have significance in the story.

Madame Marne: suitcase

Brigd: trunk

Zwida: pencil box

Irina: instrument case

Bernadette: plastic bag

Marjorie: phone

Lorna: mirror

Makiko: white maple cane

Amaranta: fireplace

Franziska: sheet of paper

I was hoping that this artifice would disclose some secret feelings towards me, within the limits of what they could say, knowing that their writings would be scrutinized by their (jealous) classmates.

Instead of me seducing them with my words, I wanted them to seduce me with theirs. I could hardly contain my excitement. Your mother started to suspect something was happening and cooled to my touch.

Then one day, the deadline arrived and all of the students handed in their work.

I had insisted that the project be surrounded by secrecy, so much so that I even banned carbon copies (this was before personal computers and laptops). I didn’t even think to photocopy each manuscript at the office. I took them straight home that night and began to read them, one after the other.

I know now that, soon after I went to bed, Maria woke and entered my study to read whatever it was that had so fascinated me late into the night.

She only had to read a few pages to know what I was up to. She packed her bags and every single one of those manuscripts and disappeared.

When I awoke with the sun, I thought your mother had gone to work early and someone else had stolen the manuscripts.

I couldn’t think of a motive, unless one of my colleagues had guessed my plan and was determined to frustrate it. Probably that damned Italo Calvino.

It was only late in the day, when Maria phoned me to say that she was staying at Italo’s for a few weeks, that I guessed what must have happened.

I quickly forgot all of my carnal designs. I was more concerned about what Calvino was doing to my wife, your mother. My colleague, my friend was sleeping with my wife. What better way to best your rival than to sleep with his wife?

For all my education though, it was an agitated guess. Jealousy made me err. Italo had no intention of sleeping with your mother.

I found out afterwards that he counseled Maria to return to me as soon as possible, especially only days later, when she learned that she was pregnant...to me, of course, with you.

It must hurt you to know that, at the time, your mother’s first thought was to have an abortion. Why perpetuate this bond with the fiend that I had become?

Italo managed to convince her what a mistake this would have been, and you know what joy you brought to your mother’s life.

Still, Italo did do something that I held against him for a long time. He read the manuscripts from beginning to end, even before I had finished them.

When, much later, I found out, I felt cheated, as if I had bought a first edition, only to have a friend whisk it away and read it before I had opened it.

Sometimes, only you should be the one to smell the scent of those first-opened pages. Not only did Calvino deprive me of this pleasure, he decided to put these manuscripts to much better use than I had intended.

He had been planning a novel, the progress of which had stalled at outline stage. These manuscripts provided exactly what he needed.

He needed the first chapters of ten stories, told in different voices. What could be better than ten stories told by ten separate students?

All he needed to do was insert metafictional interstices. He was planning to write just the interstitials.

Of course, he contacted each of my students privately and obtained their signed consent, on the basis that, when they finished their work, he would help promote their literary careers.

He did what he had bargained to do. Of the ten, six now have successful writing careers, which I attribute more to Italo’s assistance than my guidance.

Despite my pleas, Maria stayed with Calvino for more than four months, by which time it had become quite apparent to everyone that she was pregnant.

Her return coincided with the launch of Calvino’s book. Maria returned home to me, resplendent in pregnancy, the morning of his launch party.

We attended as an ostensibly happy couple, although I did appear quite sheepish and it took me many years before I actually read his book.

My failure to do so is also the reason it took me so long to put all of the pieces of this puzzle together.

My students had promised Calvino confidentiality, if only to keep his involvement secret from me.

Most importantly, Calvino had wanted your mother and I to repair our relationship, free of any external publicity or pressure.

I don’t know what would have happened if I had read his book straight away. I probably would have thought of him as a consummate manipulator.

You see, his book wasn’t just a quintessential exercise in metafiction. He was trying to teach me a lesson. He was trying to teach me to love your mother more, not to love her obsessively, but to love her as she deserved.

He saw love as the driving force of life itself. Love is the light that keeps darkness at bay. Stars shine and create light, but there is much interstitial darkness. It is the role of love to fill the gaps.

When your mother died many years later, I learned that Italo had given her a signed first edition copy of the book for each of you and her.

It was their plan to give the two of you your copy when you turned 30, when you had already learned something of life yourselves.

When she died, I committed to perform this task on her behalf.

You know how upset I was when your mother died. I always felt that I had never loved her enough.

You cannot overcompensate in love. An excessive act of love cannot make up for an omission to love. All you can do is love as someone deserves to be loved.

I felt so guilty about that time before you were born, that I planned never to write fiction again, at least until the two of you had reached the age of eighteen. I had realised that fiction is too selfish to be compatible with parenthood, after all you two were your parents’ greatest act of creation.

By the time you reached eighteen, I had got out of the habit. Only now, in my old age, is the desire to write fiction returning to me.

The inscription in your first editions varies in only one word, your first name. Indeed, Italo had two special editions of the book printed with your names reversed in the body of the text where they both appear.

In one edition, it reads “Ludmilla”, in the other it reads “Lotaria”.

So my beautiful twins, our beautiful twins, I present to you the gift of Italo Calvino and your parents.

Italo inscribed your first edition with these words:

“The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death. Your life is a story that must be told and only you can do the telling.”

Your father learned this lesson the hard way, but I am eternally grateful to your mother and my good friend, Italo Calvino, that you will have the opportunity to tell your stories.



Literary Executor’s Note:

The above manuscripts were found with Professor Julian Uzzi-Tuzii’s last Will and Testament and two signed first editions of Italo Calvino’s book, "If on a winter's night a traveller".

Professor Uzzi-Tuzii died on 8 May, 2012. He was survived by his twin daughters, Ludmilla and Lotaria Uzzi-Tuzii, who turned 30 five days later on Mother’s Day, 13 May, 2012.

The Executor of Professor Uzzi-Tuzii’s Estate made the gift to Ludmilla and Lotaria on behalf of both parents.

Ah, Metafiction, my dear friend. What a puzzlement you are. Indeed, what a veritable source of frustration you sometimes prove to be. Ever desperately struggling to find that delicate balance, to walk that oh so treacherous tightrope. After all, isn't it true that in your case, conceptual ingenuity is one thing, but simultaneously eliciting emotional investment from a reader is another?

Well, I hate to do this, I really do. Unfortunately, one of your practitioners, Italo Calvino, with his proclaimed masterpiece If on a Winter's Night a Traveller didn't quite manage to achieve the latter with this one, your humble reader. Let me explain.

This is a stupendous book. It truly is. Calvino represented your particular flavour well. You should be proud. The plot is intricately crafted, well-structured, daring. It has great prose, wonderful insights about the nature of reading, of writing, how both lifestyles intrude on life, shape it. All things any dedicated lover of literature should theoretically go for. Yes, in its time this novel was - I suppose - quite revolutionary and hip. It might still be, since it seems to steadfastly remain a favourite among the in-crowd.

Yet, why does it feel so cold, so distant, so - you're going to hate me for this - exceedingly artificial? Where is the vibrancy, the rawness? Where are the well-fleshed out characters one can invest in, the arcs? Why did visions of Calvino engaging in mental masturbation keep popping up in my mind while reading this? It's all just so dreadfully unengaging. Shouldn't this have been better served as a collection of short stories, with a metafictional framing device to connect them all?

Please don't think this slightly disappointed reader is lambasting the entire movement, I am not. I want to believe. I really, really do.

You are about to begin reading the review of Italo Calvino’s novel If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Find the most comfortable position.

Well, what are you waiting for?

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. So, then, you noticed in a newspaper that If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler has appeared, the new novel by Calvino, and you promptly went to the bookstore and bought it. Good for you.

After a long pre-preparation, goaded on by the legendary Mr. Calvino himself, you, the Reader, which was once I, the Reader, will begin to finally read what you bought this for. When the steam engine stops at the railway station, he steps down, waiting for someone to come, but doesn’t and he jumps back into another train, you know that you’ve hopped onto a thrilling ride, almost as thrilling as his who jumps into the train on station 6 in three minutes.

But alas, Mr. Calvino has other things on his mind, obviously, and at this point, you, the Reader, have grabbed his undivided attention. Because you have realized, that the story does not go further. Reader, you have been cheated. Page after page reveals the story repeated, and you go to the bookseller, demanding an explanation.

He has one ready, and there you meet the Other Reader, Ludmilla, a victim of the same fate. She’s beautiful. You want to talk to her. You do so. And you discover that there had been a glitch with the Press. So what you read was not Italo Calvino’s new novel If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, but another one by mistake, Outside the Town of Malbork, by a Polish author Tazio Bazakbal. No problems. You, the Reader, and Ludmilla, the Other Reader liked it – so you go and buy Bazakbal’s book and exchange numbers to stay in touch.

But Mr. Calvino won’t leave you there – you see, he has swindled you – he has replaced the story, and put another one. And then another one. And yet another one. But hey, you can meet Ludmilla so many times on that pretext. And Lotaria too, though you two may not get along… And all the time, Reader, do not forget that you are a Reader, and that you are Reading, and Mr. Calvino, or Bazakbal, or Flannery is writing. In Cimmerian or Cimberian.

The Author has a lot to say to you. On Writing – he can’t let you get lost in the story. No, you have to know how he came to write that. Passion? Reason? Is it Apocrypha – the hidden secret meaning of a text, mediated through the solitary act of private reading, from the author to the reader, again, in secret? On Reading – how solitary it is to read. To read one book and then another and yet another – but Reader, have you read one book or three? To not know the author, or perhaps, to know him too well. What is reading? A network of lines that enlace? Or intersect? Or is it a carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon? Or, as Mr. Okeda will tell you, your eyes on the falling of one leaf? Or two? Or more?

Dear Reader, before you get all muddled up like I, once the same Reader as perhaps you, was, I reveal this to you – this is metafiction. Reader, you will have the time of your life. Mr. Calvino will tell you ten stories – and he will tell you about writing – and reading. But you ask, smart as you are – Are the stories complete? And the seventh reader will tell you, ”Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”

And Reader, you shall reflect on these words. You have just completed If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino.

A delightful romp of two readers on a quest to find fulfillment in books. It felt like a wonderful hybrid of Borges’ compressed imagination, David Mitchell’s broken stories in “The Cloud Atlas”, and Jasper Fforde’s placement of reader sleuths into his farces.

The book got its hooks into me right from the beginning, talking directly to me as the reader entering a bookstore to acquire this new novel by Calvino. So engaging to have me negotiate through a bunch of idiosyncratic book categories. For me this one would fit the category of “Books You Have Been Meaning to Read for Ages” and “Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Has Read Them, Too”. How could I go wrong with 22 of 25 Goodreads reader friends rendering 4 or 5 stars over the experience?

This novel is less a single coherent story than a series of vivid demonstrations of the varied ways we relate to books as a reader. Into this dance are woven the perspectives of the writer, the publisher, the plagiarist, the translator, the culture bound by the common language, and the political regime which judges literature by its own agenda. The reader becomes a character experiencing different stories from different places and styles with linking interludes concerned with his quest for satisfaction of a completed read.

I don’t want to spoil the fun of the stories in the book, so I’ll keep to some examples of the themes. An overall concept Calvino plays with is the linear structure of beginnings and endings that all literature must deal with. Instead of God beginning the process of creation by separating light and darkness, the writer begins with a place and time (the iconic “It was a dark and stormy night …” of the Snoopy cartoon and here “If on a winter night a traveler …”):
But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. The romantic fascination produced in the pure state by the first sentences of the first chapter of many novels is soon lost in the continuation of the story: it is the promise of a time of reading that extends before us and can comprise all possible developments.



The continuation of this thought is a fair summary of Calvino’s efforts in this book:
I would like to write a book that is only an incipit, that maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning. , the expectation still not focused on an object. But how could such a book be constructed? Would it break off after the first paragraph? Would the preliminaries be prolonged indefinitely? Would it set the beginning of one tale inside another, as in the Arabian Nights?

The interdependence of the writer and reader is another major theme, which is brought alive by making literature some kind of performance art. Many writers in the modern age since the challenge of quantum physics came on the scene have made literary analogies with the contribution of the observer to consensus reality, but Calvino makes such play a lot of fun. The role of the reader in the story begins as a simple identification with the “I” of a first-person narration. In slipping into third-person narrative, we come to feel we are looking over the shoulder or through the eyes of the writer or his narrator, whether Calvino on the upper layers or those of the stories-within-the-story. But things begin to get more complicated the moment the writer engages the reader directly with a second-person “you”, which can get expanded with a plural version, or bind the reader even more by slipping into a “we” mode. All this academic stuff is made flesh in the story as you the reader of the first tale meet another reader seeking the completion of a book interrupted by a publisher’s defect.

This “Other Reader”, Ludmilla, is a woman quite alluring to the first Reader (and to me). To her a book is some kind of doorway to an unwritten reality waiting to come into existence. Some examples:
“…I wish the things I read weren’t all present, so solid you can touch them; I would like to feel a presence around them, something else, you don’t know quite what, the sign of some unknown thing. …”
“Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be …”
”The book I would like to read now is a novel in which you sense the story arriving like still-vague thunder, the historical story along with the individual’s story, a novel that gives the sense of living through an upheaval that still has no name, has not yet taken shape …”.

As the Reader begins to seek a personal relationship with Ludmilla, his efforts are interfered with by her sister Lotaria. For her books are not sacrosanct, but merely a tool to be used for their ideas. She uses computer programs to deconstruct novels into themes identifiable by word frequencies. She is writing a thesis on a certain author’s work to “to demonstrate her theories.” While Ludmilla finds any knowledge about the author as a person irrelevant (her ideal author is one who produces books “as a pumpkin vine produces pumpkins”), Lotaria, seeks dialog with the author for participation in interpretation. In a wonderful scene where she corners a blocked Irish writer, he is taken aback that she seeks in his work only what she already believes in. She asks:
“Would you want me to read in your books only what you’re convinced of?”
“That isn’t it. I expect readers to read in my books something I didn’t know, but I can expect it only from those who expect to read something they didn’t know.”
“What you want would be a passive way of reading, escapist and regressive …That’s how my sister reads. …”

The author finds no uplift from either sister’s views in the face of the blank pages that haunt him. Ludmilla as the ideal reader is tarnished by banishing him as a person (“How well I would write if I were not here!”). The magic of the writer’s leap is marvelously captured in a scenario in which he watches a neighbor woman on an outdoor deck as she reads:
At times I am gripped by an absurd desire: that the sentence I am about to write be the one the woman is reading at that same moment.

Instead of being a fruitful impetus, the fantasy becomes instead an albatross and a curse:
At times I convince myself that the woman is reading my true book, the one I should have written long ago, but will never succeed in writing…It’s no use my sitting down again at the desk, straining to guess, to copy that true book of mine she is reading: whatever I may write will be false, a fake, compared to my true book, which no one except her will ever read.
…Readers are my vampires. I feel a throng of readers looking over my shoulder and seizing the words as they are set down on paper.

The analogies of reading and sex are a wonderful topic of play for Calvino. The meanings of sex between author and reader is a source of farce. Sex between the Reader and other characters brings out the whimsy of writer as a superego God. The multisensory wonders of sex in collapsing time and space is a worthy model for a book to aspire to, but the subject here becomes an excuse for a flight of abstraction as arcane as Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Stairway” (e.g. “is it the most submissive abandonment, the exploration of the immensity of strokable and reciprocal stroking spaces, the dissolving of one’s being in a lake whose surface is infinitely tactile?”).

In sum, I had a lot of fun with all the gymnastics and somersaults Calvino serves up. Many readers will find this book too didactic, just an illustration of ideas. But because Calvino embraces paradox and complementarity of ideas, there is plenty of lively play free of dogmatism. This is the same feeling I got from his posthumously published book, a set of undelivered lectures titled “Six Memos for a New Millennium”. In it he explores literary values he considered important for the future of writing: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity (the sixth was supposed to be Consistency). I delighted to see how he assessed diverse literature by these themes and would look forward to someone elucidating the specified themes as embodied in this novel itself.


An impish Calvino from the pen of David Levine for the New York Review of Books

My head thought it liked this book -- terrific beginning -- but apparently my heart had other ideas, because I got about halfway through and just never got around to finishing it. The thing's still sitting on my "active" shelf, looking smug, and reminding me that when it comes to affairs of the book, I can be a little bit dumb, and a lot flakey.

I don't know. In my defense, I'm not so crazy about most "tricky" fiction, for the same reason that I don't like participating in psychological studies, and also because I found it hard to find anyone to hook into and care about in what felt like a slippery, shifting magic trick with characters who clearly weren't real and who were, to me, particularly unsympathetic and two-dimensional. Also the use of the second-person was a bit distracting, because I'd get caught up in the thought, "I am a young, frisky, Italian man with amorous and literary aspirations!" and would get all excited and confused about that, and I'd become diverted from the action taking place in the novel, and start thinking about how nice my shoes probably were. Plus, the girl was annoying. Finally, Calvino'd snatch away the really lovely stories just when I'd get engaged with them, and leave me way too long with the boring ones... the whole chasing-down-the-publisher saga just couldn't hold me after awhile, and it was during a particularly tedious part of this that I saw something shiny and got distracted and laid it down, and just never went back.

All that said, writing this is reminding me of all the things I did like about this book. It is quite wonderfully written and breaks apart and looks at something hard to explain about reading and writing, which would make it timely right now, what with my new debilitating obsession with Bookster. Maybe I'll return to it this weekend, instead of working on all that schoolwork I'm supposed to be doing.

[Revised 12/4/22]

An experimental novel. The main character is a reader who can’t finish a book because the print copies are mixed up and he ends up reading first chapters of various novels over and over again. He meets up with a woman who has the same problem and he goes on a search to find the rest of the book for both of them.



Actually there are two women, sisters, who have different ideas about books and what the purpose of reading is. They appear in different guises throughout the story. The narrative is labyrinth-like as if Borges had written it.

But it’s not fair to really focus on the “plot.” Like many of Calvino’s works, this is more a work of philosophy than a novel. And, like all of Calvino’s work, there’s a heavy dose of fantasy and absurdity. There’s a professor of “Cimmerian literature and Bothno-Ugaric languages” which sounded so realistic I looked them up to be sure they weren’t real!

The book is made up of ten stories; think of them as chapters. Recurring themes are messages that the main character sees around him and how we relate to books. “Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.” There is discussion of “someone who has learned not to read.”

The author touches on issues with translated books. There’s a chapter on ways of reading a book. While reading, “something must always remain that eludes us,” which has often been said of poetry. Well, there are quite a few things that will elude the reader a bit in this book!

I enjoyed his digs at deconstruction and the French scholars, such as this passage referring to a conference: “…during the reading there must be some who underline the reflections of production methods, others the process of reification, others the sublimation of repression, others the sexual semantic codes, others the metalanguages of the body, others the transgressions of roles, in politics and in private life.”

I thought the passage below was apropos given current concerns about ‘fake news.’ Prescient because this book was first published in 1979.

“We’re in a country where everything that can be falsified has been falsified: paintings in museums, gold ingots, bus tickets. The counterrevolution and the revolution fight with salvos of falsification: the result is that no one can be sure what is true and what is false, the political police simulate revolutionary actions and the revolutionaries disguise themselves as policemen.”

I have liked other works by Calvino such as Invisible Cities (essays), and The Watcher (short stories), but this one just didn’t do it for me. I was lost at times in the narrative and had to re-read to figure out what was going on. But many passages had great insight. I may be short-changing it in rating it a ‘3’ as GR readers overall rate it a ‘4.’



It’s hard to classify what type of author Calvino (1923-1985) was. Perhaps post-modern best describes this book because of its focus on the acts of reading and writing and what is literature. He wrote 15 or so novels and a couple of dozen collections of short stories and essays. Most of his works involve fables, fantasy, magical realism and even science fiction. If on a Winter’s Night is his best-known novel and Invisible Cities is his most-read collection of stories.

Top photo of Florence from florencephotos.com
The author from thenewyorker.com

You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Then who the hell else are you talking... you talking to me? Well I'm the only one here.

No I am not Travis Bickle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQkpe... And yet, Italo Calvino is very clearly talkin' to me. And right from the beginning: "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler." Which is exactly what I was about to do. Spooky.* And he kept calling me Reader, which I was clearly doing, as if to remind me that the you was me. And then he introduced an Other Reader. The Other Reader was (is) female. Travis I mean Reader I mean You, okay, I, damnit, see her in a bookstore reading a book that I was reading, a book I was enjoying very much, but the pages were not all cut and some were missing, so I moseyed over to ask her if her book was similarly enigmatic - although, frankly if it was really I and not Travis or Reader, Other Reader would have been an ex-swimsuit model on a beach chaise with a snarky sense of humor and a Javier Marias novel in her hands, but boy was he close** - and sure enough her copy had the same issues. You We notify the publisher who sends another copy but it's a different book, which is also good, but that one gets stolen, or lost, or mistranslated or .... something, until you I have started ten books in all without concluding any one of them until you I can say "I've almost finished If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino." There is a translator running amuck, and the Other Reader has a sister, who changes names and personae every hour or so. The fantasy - yes, fantasy*** - with Other Reader remains as elusive as the novel. We're all connected, we morph; ultimate answers elude.****

Yes, you, really YOU now, are right: it's like David Mitchell without the force-field Zap guns.

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?

_____ _____ _____ _____ _____

"Excuse me," I say. "There are some pages missing from my book and I was really enjoying it. I see you're reading the same book. Is your story the same?"

"You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me?"

_____ _____ _____ _____ _____

*At one point, my mind numbed, just a little, and I read, Are you reading or daydreaming? How did he know that?

**"Male dreams don't change, not even with the revolution," she says ... aggressive sarcasm in her voice.

***What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.

****Something must always remain that eludes us . . . As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues. . . . And every evening I, too, abandon myself to reading, like that distant unknown woman....

Kahramanı okuyucusu olan postmodern roman. Kafa karıştırıcı gibi en başta. Çok geçmeden ne olduğunu anlamaya çalışırken olayın içinde buluyorsunuz kendinizi, romanın başkahramanı oluveriyorsunuz ve Calvino'nun tam da yapmak istediği şey bu aslında.

Roman boyunca romanla aynı adı taşıyan bir romanın eksik bir parçasını bulmaya çalışıyoruz ve bunu adeta bir ölüm kalım meselesine çeviriyoruz. Roman içinde roman oluveriyoruz. Bir yapboz gibi sürekli parçaları yerine koymayı deniyoruz, olacak gibi oluyor ama bir türlü tam olarak olduramıyoruz.

Kitap bu anlamda, biçim olarak bir süre sonra anlattığı şeye dönüşüyor. Bu muazzam bir dönüşüm ve o kadar farkettirmeden yapıyor ki bunu Calvino, kitabı kapattığımızda puzzle eksik kalmış oluyor, açtığımızda oyun devam ediyor.

Calvino Bir Kış Gecesi Eğer Bir Yolcu ile bize kurgu nasıl yapılır, öğretiyor. Biran kendimizi çok önemli bir işin parçası sanarken, aniden kayıt duruyor, "kestik, kestik" diyor sanki. ve şunu hatırlatıyor acımasızca : "sen bu kitabı okuyan kişisin aslında sevgili okur ve ben nereye istersem artık oraya gideceksin, seni esir aldım" Kitabın o farkındalık anlarında bana bir hüzün çöktü desem yalan olmaz. Neden derseniz şöyle açıklamaya çalışayım; kendimizi kahramanı sandığımız hikayelerin aslında birer figüranı olduğumuzu fark ettiğimiz o yıkıcı anlar, yine de içinde var olmaktan vazgeçemediğimiz ve kitap bitene dek orada kaldığımız hikayeler geldi aklıma.

Calvino kötü okur olmak ile ilgili çok düşünmüş iyi bir yazar. Hikaye anlatmakla oyun oynamanın da birbirine paralel gittiğini iyi çalışmış, çözmüş bir yazar ayrıca. Kimbilir belki de bu romanıyla bize, artık klasik bir yöntemle, hikayeyi doğrudan anlatmanın monotonluğunu göstermeye çalışıyordur, belki de kendisinin doğrudan bir hikaye anlatmayı başaramadığını, belki de her ikisini de!

Benim en en sevdiğim kitaplardan biri Bir Kış Gecesi Eğer Bir Yolcu. Şiddetle okumanızı tavsiye ederim.

A slick trick and trap of a novel, a complex story of cogs and frames. Narrators and readers collide and disappear. Styles float by (are experimented on) and are quickly replaced by other metafictional techniques. Anyway, I'm going to need more time and more sleep to absorb this book, but I'm not sure how anyone after first reading it could dislike the spirit, creativity, and absolute panache (yeah, I'll edit out panache tomorrow) of this novel.

"অদ্ভুত" "অনন্য" জাতীয়  শব্দ বহুব্যবহারে জীর্ণ হয়ে গেলেও এই উপন্যাসের ক্ষেত্রে এগুলো বলা ছাড়া উপায় নেই। If on a winter's night a traveler সর্ব অর্থেই অদ্ভুত, সর্ব অর্থেই অনন্য। 

ধরুন, আপনি খুব আগ্রহ নিয়ে একটা বই পড়ছেন, মাত্র গল্পটা জমে উঠেছে, তখনই টের পেলেন গল্পের পরের অংশটা নেই। তার বদলে আছে অন্য একটা গল্প। নিশ্চয়ই ছাপার ভুল! আপনি বই বদলে নিয়ে আসলেন কিন্তু দেখলেন সেখানে অন্য একটা গল্প এবং সেটাও শেষ হয়নি; পরে আছে অন্য গল্প। আপনার মাথা গরম হয়ে গেলো, জানতেই হবে এমনটা হচ্ছে কেন। দেখা হোলো এক পাঠিকার সাথে যে কিনা আপনার মতোই ভুক্তভোগী। দুজনে মিলে জড়িয়ে গেলেন আরো অনেক অনেক অসমাপ্ত গল্প এবং আরো অনেক রহস্যের ফাঁদে। পাঠক, সাহিত্যিক, প্রকাশক, অনুবাদক সবাই এর চরিত্র। উত্তরাধুনিক এ উপন্যাস পাঠকের মনে হাজারো প্রশ্ন তৈরি করে, ক্যালভিনো প্রশ্নের উত্তর না দিয়ে আরো প্রশ্ন তৈরি করেন, উসকে দেন পাঠকের চিন্তাকে। কেন উত্তরাধুনিক সাহিত্যে গল্প সরলরৈখিক নয়, কেন তাতে কাহিনি ধোঁয়াটে আর অসম্পূর্ণ থাকে তার উত্তর অবশ্য দিয়েছেন ক্যালভিনো। প্রাচীনকালে শুধু দুটো উপায়ে গল্প শেষ হোতো। নায়ক সব পরীক্ষায় উত্তীর্ণ হতো, নায়ক নায়িকা বিয়ে করতো অথবা নায়কের মৃত্যু ঘটতো। অর্থাৎ সব গল্পের শুধু দুটো সমাধান - জীবনের প্রবহমানতা অথবা মৃত্যু। 
ভালো লাগুক বা খারাপ, ক্যালভিনোর এই মাস্টারপিসের মতো আপনি  কিছু পড়েননি নির্ঘাৎ। একবার হাতে তুলে নিয়ে দেখতেই পারেন।