When I was young in the 1950’s, the whole family would gather around our ancient rabbit-eared black & white TV when the postwar sensation Perry Como came on.

And every week, he’d start out by singing, ‘Dream along with me - I’m on my way to the Stars!’

That’s sorta like where the magician Calvino sends us, in this bemusing and magical romp through the strawberry fields of our imaginations - and his.

His book is the very stuff dreams are made on!

He uses everything but the kitchen sink as the components for this Rube-Goldbergian literary contraption aimed at one thing only:

Our SHEER DELIGHT.

Calvino had his brains stretched quite a bit, half-starving in the Italian hill country, a fugitive from Mussolini’s ‘justice’ while working for the Resistance - but post-traumatic stress can, with an iron and sternly self-possessing will, be put to bountiful use.

Witness books like this.

And we are his beneficiaries in this golden legacy of tales - tales that transpire in a magical twilight land halfway between the real and the unreal.

But though Calvino’s wildly inventive yarns seem in essence so wonderful, he doesn’t allow any whimsical turn of plot to turn back upon itself in a comforting mind-fold, or even repeat itself assuringly at another point of the book.

There is little closure, and it is all so vibrantly open-ended and inventive!

So WHY is he going so strongly against the common grain, endlessly changing the subject with each new chapter?

Well, this Italian postmodernist, like us, is afflicted grievously with the ricocheting catastrophes of each day’s brutal events - trumpeted at every fraction of a half-turn by the proud press - and has no secure foothold.

For as Paul Simon wrote:

You can’t expect to be bright and bon vivant
So far away from home.

Our heart will always be in our first home, as Bachelard says in The Poetics of Space, and so it is the place where all our dreams have their root.

The modern age has cast us adrift. We must begin at the beginning again.

If we think back, we’ll see how our childhood dreams were rocked to sleep in the shadow of the informing myths and legends of our age.

Working below the surface of reality in our meditations, we can knit the scattered pieces of our lives back together with stories like Calvino’s.

Scattered stories. Separate stories. Like the stories of our everyday nondescript lives.

And Calvino lives in a world leached of its meaning by the press, as we do.

He lives in an open-ended universe. As a new book recently put it, everything is now Quantumnition! Grist for the mill of chance.

So Pascal, after his life-affirming mystical vision - he was a man WAY ahead of his time, by the way - said “man is a thinking reed.”

He means, without God in our lives we are apt to change our mind with every new wind.

But until we find Him, postmodernism is the aegis under which we and Calvino must create our ethereal kingdoms of romance...

And from thence our unending attempts at magical escapes! Until, as Forster says, we “only connect” our own stories and escapes to the overarching myths that make our minds what they are.

So DON’T be waylaid by your frustration in not initially making sense of his fantastic crazy-quilt jumble of yarns.

And don’t get stressed thinking about their place in the story -

Just RELAX AND ENJOY!

And if you’ve never read Calvino, you’re in for the RIDE OF YOUR LIFE!

So, if you’re feeling comfortably relaxed now:

Once in a lifetime, along comes a book...

That’s absolutely Perfect for a Long Cold Night of Dream-laden, Meandering Reading...

And THIS is IT!

I say this is what happened:
Italo Calvino was suffering from a writer's block. He would start a novel, get it to its first curve and abandon it before the resolution. A few months later he would start another with a similar result. Finally, his publishers got impatient because it had been years since the last novel and they said:
'Italo, get your shit together! We need a new book. Now!'
Italo panicked and did the only thing he could think of. He glued all his failed attempts together and delivered it to the publisher
'Here it is. My new novel'.
'Er.. Italo, but those are just beginning of some 10 different books...'
'Yeah. I know. Don't you get it? It's postmodernism!!'
'Ok...'
'You know, I am playing with the concept of the author. It is basically all about the reader now. The author has become obsolete. It is the reader that creates the work and the author is not even necessary!'
'Ah.. I see... Do we still need to pay you then?'
'Yah. Will mail you the invoice.'

I have read most of the reviews on here and I agree with all of them, with the bad ones and the good ones all the same. If you think this is contradictive and not possible, think again. And one word for you: deconstructionism.
There is no doubt that Calvino is (was) one hell of a writer and he plays with his poor readers like a cat plays with a mouse. This book was an absolute trip and really gets you dizzy. It might or might not be a coincidence that a day after finishing it I caught some weird bug that made me throw up for two days straight.

Now I am going to talk about one aspect that none of the reviewers have pointed out. It is so fucking sexist, like HELLO! All the female characters in each one of the novels as well as the main novel (that puts the novels together) have all the charecteristics of the Other. The female reader is actually called The Other Reader for crying out loud. Even when for a short moment the narration is switched to make the female reader the subject, it is only so that the male reader can run around her flat and describe her and define her – and check this, she is NOT EVEN THERE. Calvino makes her/me the subject for a few pages and she is not even there. She is forever passive. All the female characters are more or less passive. They are also mysterious, intagible and ethereal and their actions usually make no sense to the subject of the narrative (be it the You from the main narrative, or the various 'I's from the sub-novels). This kind of stuff really gets on my nerves. Especially since I read 'The Other Sex' by Simone de Beauvoir.
So Calvino, deconstruct that old as the world archetype, why don't you!!! (Only you can't because you are dead).

Calvino met a muse.
Then he met a metamuse.
But was it all a ruse?

nyehh...

Who am I to disabuse?


I had such grandiose plans for reviewing this book. Then I made the mistake of reading what my luminous Goodreading friends had already said and realized I had no luster to add. I briefly toyed with the idea of a metareview of those reviews, but lacked the energy and time to follow through. Besides, I’ve produced a lot of flab lately and decided to avoid the excess this time. If what you seek is insight, humor, or tributes in kind (masterfully metafictive in some cases), check out the reviews by Ian, Garima, Aubrey, Kalliope, Michael, Madeleine, Brian, Samadrita, Algernon, Drew, Jonathan, JSou, MJ, and/or Manny.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

Italo Calvino

Just one word: AWESOME !!


"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveller. Relax. Let the world around you fade."

The opening line of this unusual book really fades the world around you and immerses you in a mystical, eccentric, surreal world where you are energised right from the scratch to encounter the world which refers to its own existence- something which is unprecedented.





The book is a genius in a way that how it approaches the story- narrative of the book is in second person -the protagonist is a young male reader known simply as The Reader. There is a second character, a female reader, referred to by the author as the Other Reader. The relationship between the two characters is one of the two plot drivers of the book. Calvino borrows plot and style from authors of each of different genres, inserting them in his novel, making it inter-textual, or based off of many texts. The author has a lot to stay with the ongoing story.

The protagonist of the book is apparently 'you'- the reader- who then moves through the inter-textuality of the novel to come across different manuscripts- each of which is interrupted just after 'You' begins to relish it; and 'You' continues to search for a thread through which 'You' can connect these manuscripts, however soon 'You' realizes that it's a futile attempt to look for such a thread , and that too not before 'You' finds another character facing the same dilemma- both of you spans bookshops, probable authors (of those manuscripts) to look for such a thread . Eventually, 'You' accepts that it's the structure of book- those manuscripts are written not to be connected- and when 'You' starts enjoying it-its structure, puzzles, prose style- just then it ends and 'You' gets the same feeling which 'You' gets after finishing a surreal movie.

The book works in a strange way to its readers, in way that there may be some instances when you would feel that you are enjoying a particular phase of a chapter of the book then Calvino would surreptitiously raise himself to the horizon and would do something unexpected but pleasing and you would be mesmerized by it; this speaks volume about his ability. It also underlines the metafiction traits present in the book as the author wants to delve yourself into the narrative to enjoy it fully.

The novel- which can be best described as: book within a book about many books - can be said as epitome of postmodern literature- a perfect example of meta-fiction; Calvino proposes that novels could be more quickly read by having a computer break them down into lists of word frequencies; he sets down sample lists to evoke whole novels. He shows 'You' the developments in modern literature- the books which have become prominent examples of contemporary literature: in the process he depicts human nature about possessions while spanning 'You' through a bookshop to finally arrive at If on a winter's night a traveller

"But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend 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 Category Of Books Read Before Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. ..........; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Reread and The Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read And Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them............you have turned toward a stack of If on a winter's night a traveller fresh off the press, you grasped a copy, and you have carried it to the cashier so that your right to own it can be established."

"Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life,if they are defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books."




Calvino explores human sexuality through the relationship between two characters- through interaction between them, their interests. The two central characters share a love of reading for reading's sake, in contrast to some of the other characters in the book. It is this shared love which drives the romance, but the book recognizes that reading is ultimately an activity you do alone: One reads alone, even in another's presence. But Calvino also draws the parallel between love-making and reading. The narrative of the book here gradually moves to 'The Other Reader' from 'You'

"Ludmilla, now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert to your gasps and your trills. It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being. "





In the last chapter Calvino shares his thought- his different point of views- about reading through different readers, the first reader says:
“Don’t be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue ot the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.”

Calvino best describes the experience of reading through the sixth reader:
"The moment that counts most for me is the one that precedes reading. At times a title is enough to kindle in me the desire for a book that perhaps does not exist. At times it is the incipit of the book, the first sentences. . . . In other words: if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.”




At this juncture, I am facing the dilemma which is unique to works of Calvino- it isn't easy to review them and this one also seems to be another futile attempt.
However, there's one thing which can be said with assurance that If on a winter's night a traveller is a book about the pleasure of reading.

they say a girl never forgets her first calvino

Very clever and knowing book that invites parody and a clever review in the same vein; however life is too short. Imagine this is not a review and go and read the book. It is worth reading and is very well structured.
Calvino invites the reader into the books in a very self conscious way to participate and reflect on the nature of reading itself. The book is a series of interlinked incomplete stories held together by the participation of the reader. I found the ending a bit of a let down, but very much enjoyed the book.
Some of Calvino's inventions are true; Cimmerian and Cimbrian are both languages that have existed. Calvino was influenced by Nabakov and by an organisation called Oulipo (look it up, it's rather odd and explains a lot about Calvino's writing). Oulipo members use certain types of writing techniques to produce creative works. Another book on my tbr list, Perec's "A Void", a rather long novel which does not use the letter e, is another example. Interestingly members of Oulipo remain members, even after death.
The plot contrivances are interesting and hold the attention; very enjoyable.

57th book of 2021. Artist for this review is Argentine painter Lucio Fontana.

You are new in the area and your parents are desperate to get rid of you because although you are only trying to help, you are getting in the way of the moving process—the boxes are too big for you to lift, the lorry-men talk with such cigarette-smoked voices that you cannot understand them or their quips to you, and as much as you'd like to appear helpful, you cannot wait for all the boxes to be gone and everything go back to how it was (that is, move back into the house you've just left, the house you loved dearly).

It is for these reasons that they allow you to go (alone) to the park opposite the house ("we can still see you fine," they argued). The park is named "The Oulipo Playground"; and because you are new to the area, you (and by extension, your parents) are unaware that the playground is generally avoided. The boys found in the playground are strange; they play odd games that no one else has heard of, they whisper to one another, talk in inside-jokes (one quickly realises who is on the inside—it isn't you) and laugh at a lot at things that don't seem, to you, particularly funny. You are ignorant of this, and so push the gate open with happy abandon and enter into their strange domain.

All other playground inhabitants are also without parents and many of the boys look like grown men: one boy, nearby, looks at you quizzically from behind very round glasses. But your eye is drawn to another boy, and the reason is twofold: firstly, he is standing at the top of the slide and looking down on you and, secondly, his hair is wild, an explosion from his scalp, thick and curled. You are naturally drawn away from the slide-stander and towards a genial-looking chap to one side. You ask him what is going on. He replies, with a foreign accent, that the boys are playing a game. (You look around you but can't form any concept of a game: all the figures in the park are very still and looking at one another with silent, but smirking, faces.) You introduce yourself anyway and the other boy introduces himself back, Italo, he says.

Over the next few weeks as your parents continually unpack, decorate, argue, redecorate, etc., you continually go downstairs and across the road (you've never seen a car drive down it, but you remain vigilant as taught) to The Oulipo Playground. You now consider yourself friends with Italo, though you find him volatile; at times he is eager to explain the games the other boys are playing with one another, saying Perec (the French boy with the wild hair) is doing this, and this means that Duchamp must do this and Queneau (round glasses) must retaliate with this, and so on. You never really grasp what Italo is explaining to you and the others sometimes call upon him (“Calvino! Calvino!”) to join in and he leaves you for a time to do so, but you remain interested all the same. Other times you arrive at the playground and Italo seems irritated by your presence and despite your questioning, will not give you any answers to what is happening or why. “Why is Perec doing that? What must Queneau do?” And Italo turns his back on you, even, at times, holds up his hand; but most irritably of all is when he begins to tell you but before he has finished his explanation, he suddenly stops and goes quiet, and no amount of badgering gets him to finish what he was saying. You have cried sometimes at night thinking that it must be your fault that Italo is acting in this way: suddenly cold and disinterested from the day before, when he was affable and witty. You’ve tried only once to talk to Perec but otherwise you shy away from him. The others seem too distant for you to even try. Queneau incessantly repeats himself to you, telling the same story over and over again but each time with a slightly different spin on it, so you never quite know whether he is telling the truth or mad. You report none of this back to your parents because it is baffling for you, let alone them, and they are already tired enough from attempting to build cheaply-bought but apparently highly convenient and affordable furniture.

Once again it is a day (a slightly overcast one, but warm) where you find Italo in a disgruntled mood. He began by explaining the current game, “Yes, and you see Perec over there on the swings, well this is because…” but soon he appears bored by explaining it all to you in minute detail and stops. You hide your frustration and stand silently (and sullenly) beside him to observe the rest of the unintelligible game of long silences, strange words, odd movements, and general, you believe, madness. You go to bed that night flustered and hurt, once again. The following day you set out with purpose: to tell Italo that his manner is unfair. He is standing in his usual spot at the side of the playground and the other boys are dotted about, some standing, some sitting, some doing precarious handstands (seemingly vital to the game at hand) and some with their fingers either over their eyes or ears. “Italo,” you say, “I am tired of our friendship.” His eyebrows jump. “But why?” he asks. You throw your hands in the air, how can he not see! “One day you appear to be my friend and the next not! Some days you tell me the games and the stories and other days not, or you tell me only half and leave me frustrated! I never know where I stand. I can’t even call you a friend, but you’re not an enemy,” you hasten to add; “I don’t know what you are!” Italo, for once, is the flustered one between the two of you. He scratches his face and tuts. “We are playing our own game, I thought you knew.” You say: “I didn’t know, and I don’t understand this game, or any game!” Once again, you fling your arms around. Italo pacifies you with a smile and says, “The rules hardly matter, only that you have fun.” You grumble. “I can’t have fun if I don’t know the rules or what the aim is, I don’t understand the point of any of this. I think you might all be mad.” Queneau is standing nearby but luckily he has his hands over his ears and does not hear this. “We play differently from other boys,” Italo tells you, “but we think our games are more fun.” You don’t see anything wrong with hide-and-seek. “All games are the same, so banal,” Italo moans (you don’t know what banal means but it sounds negative), “we are trying something different. That’s good, no?” You honestly can’t answer: your mother says being different is a wonderful thing and that you should embrace the fact that you seem to have less friends than everyone else and read all the time instead of playing football, but on the other hand, this sort of different seems so farfetched. “But Italo, I’m not sure I’ve had any fun at all.” Italo sighs and yawns loudly (rudely) and then says, “You kept coming back, I thought that meant you were having fun." “I came back because,” you begin to say, and find you aren’t sure why you kept returning; it was all so strange and different, it intrigued you, yes, that is one reason. Were you having fun, through your frustrations? On some days it might have been close to fun, on other days it was certainly frustration, even boredom. Italo had a nice way of putting things and you liked that. Under all his stories and false-starts he seemed like an interesting person and a good sort of fellow to have around, but other than that, what was the reason? Even after yesterday’s poor affair you returned once again, if only to tell him your true feelings, but what was your purpose for doing that, to reconcile and allow your friendship to carry on? “It doesn’t matter why you came back, only that you did,” Italo says, interrupting your thoughts. “We all have so much fun here,” he says. You knew that already, looking at them all smirking and whispering to one another. “If I stay will it be worth it? Does it get more fun?” Italo shrugs his shoulders: “I don’t know! I invent the fun. You have to invent your own sort of fun here too.” For a split-second you consider hitting Italo on the nose as your fun-invention but that thought is gone in a flash and you embrace your strange comrade. “So, let me explain this game currently,” he then says. You rub your hands together. “Queneau is standing here like this because Perec over there, and Duchamp, are teaming up against him. Rumour has it there is some back-stabbing involved. The swings are key, as is the jeep on the springs that rocks back-and-forth. The others are all somehow involved too. There’s a great conspiracy. The truth is, the real back-stabber…” Italo looks up suddenly and sees a bird going overhead. You ignore it, listening in. But, he’s gone. Italo is no longer going to finish what he was saying. You walk home in a sulk, kicking old cans and grumbling (though you do check left and right at the deserted road). The next day though you wake up and find yourself eager to return to the playground to see what Italo has to say to you, if anything at all.

*****************************************

2nd Reading: 2021.

The fakery in the novel appeared to me more overtly on my second reading. The games were, as ever, frustrating and engaging at once, in typical postmodern fashion. I refer to it as the Postmodern Pendulum; it tends to be, for me, the swinging between high-brow and low-brow, which is more Pynchonian and DFWallian, but here in Calvino it feels more like Nabokov postmodernism, which is perhaps subtler. (Calvino gives credit to Nabokov and Borges for this novel, which is no surprise.) On one page we feel almost as if we can sympathise with Humbert Humbert, for example, and on the next we are reminded of his true nature and we are sickened by him, and in turn, ourselves. Calvino adopts this sort of pendulum of emotion: boredom/frustration v. intrigue/wit/entertainment. This book is only 200/250 pages long but feels longer. All the false-starts bog it down and the second-person sections are enjoyable especially in the beginning but eventually go too far and become a little too much. That first chapter is purely golden though, a giant reflection on reading as a process and as an abstract idea. As the novel opens:
n  

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveller. 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. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice—they won't hear you otherwise—"I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.

n

“Concetto Spaziale, Attese”—1960

(Calvino reflects on literature in other books too; he does with great warmth and beauty in The Baron in the Trees, which is vastly different from this.) As it goes on it gets deeper and deeper and more tangled in its own web, so to speak. Really, we end up looking at multiple fakes, multiple forgeries, multiple beginnings, conspiracies, ideas, realities: it is quite a lot for such a short novel. Calvino lets us in at times and blocks us out at others, making for a very volatile experience. Frankly, almost for this reason alone, the book falls short of 5-stars for me, though I think it’s quite exceptional. I have read before (I don’t know if it’s true or not, so to add more fakery) that Calvino was being pressured to release another book but had nothing but a load of first chapters of abandoned projects so he lumped them altogether, added the second-person chapters to the mix and published it, calling it, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. If it is true it’s sort of brilliant and a giant cheat all at once, which describes the novel perfectly anyway. It’s a head-wobbler.

I still think Invisible Cities is better. Not the best place to start with old Calvino. If you like him, dive-in, and see if you still like him. As my lecturer once called him, "the icy postmodernist", prepare to get cold (but, also, at times, warm).

*****************************************
1st Reading: 2019.

It's taken me a while to read this, which is no fault of the book. I've had a real surge of writing and inspiration recently so I've spent my time writing rather than reading. Then that will exhaust itself and I will read constantly and have no time, or inspiration, to write. It's quite frustrating how the two can't work in perfect harmony beside one another. Almost as frustrating as trying to find If On a Winter's Night a Traveller.

بیست‌وچهارم بهمن، سر ظهر. تو دانشگاه پرنده پر نمیزنه. تو کل طبقه‌ی دوم دانشکده فقط منم و من. توی کلاس تنها نشستم، طبق معمول چراغا رو خاموش گذاشتم. آفتاب بعد دو روز اومده بیرون و برفا رو آب می‌کنه. نوری که از پنجره میفته‌‌ داخل چشمم رو میزنه. بلند میشم پرده‌ها رو می‌کشم و برمی‌گردم سر جای همیشگیم. تو تاریکی، کتاب جدیدی رو که از کتابخونه گرفتم باز می‌کنم و با همون جمله‌ی اول، می‌فهمم که من قراره عاشقِ «اگر شبی از شب‌های زمستان مسافری» بشم.
این حرفا ارزشی خاصی نداره، مگه برای کسی که فصل اول کتاب رو خونده باشه؛ فصلی که با خوندنش آدم متوجه میشه با یه کتاب معمولی طرف نیست.
با هر آپدیت از احساسات ضد و نقیضم درباره‌ی این کتاب نوشتم؛ و الان تنها چیزی که دارم بگم اینه که یکی از بهترین کتاب‌هایی بود که تا به حال خوندم‌. نسبتا پیچیده بود، اما پیچیدگیش‌ به دل می‌نشست و آدم رو وسوسه می‌کرد تا معماش رو حل کنه.

"What is my perfect crime? I break into Tiffany's at midnight. Do I go for the vault? No, I go for the chandelier. It's priceless. As I'm taking it down, a woman catches me. She tells me to stop. It's her father's business. She's Tiffany. I say no. We make love all night. In the morning, the cops come and I escape in one of their uniforms. I tell her to meet me in Mexico, but I go to Canada. I don't trust her. Besides, I like the cold. Thirty years later, I get a postcard. I have a son and he's the chief of police. This is where the story gets interesting. I tell Tiffany to meet me in Paris by the Trocadero. She's been waiting for me all these years. She's never taken another lover. I don't care. I don't show up. I go to Berlin. That's where I stashed the chandelier."

- Dwight K. Schrute, The Office

"This happens to me in writing: for some time now, every novel I begin writing is exhausted shortly after the beginning, as if I had already said everything I have to say.
I have had the idea of writing a novel composed only of beginnings of novels. The protagonist could be a Reader who is continually interrupted. The Reader buys the new novel A by the author Z. But it is a defective copy, he can't go beyond the beginning....He returns to the bookshop to have the volume exchanged...."

- Silas Flannery, If on a winter's night a traveler

Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler is, fundamentally, a book about reading. It's about the act of reading, what a book can convey to a reader, what it can't convey to a reader, the relationship between a reader and their book, the relationship between a reader and other readers, the relationship between a reader and the environment in which they are reading, how when you read, even with others around, you are alone, etc.

The story is brilliant, mind-bending, and pretty funny at times, but it can also be tedious and boring as well. The whole idea behind the book is that you, the protagonist, are trying to read a book, Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, but you end up being halted early on, right when the story is getting interesting, because your copy is mis-printed and the rest of the story is missing. You end up going through the beginnings of ten different books for increasingly confusing reasons in this fashion. Similar to the first book, with each succeeding volume you are frustratingly stopped right when the story is getting interesting. The chapters in between these book fragments set up the next book fragment, each time leading you in a completely different direction than the one you were pursuing before. But as a reader, Calvino tells you that you don't care too much about this constant book-jumping. All you care about is reading one of these books from beginning to end.

Calvino's describing my feelings about this aside, the real non-book-protagonist me found the book-jumping to be a bit repetitive after a while, and I found some of the ten stories to be a bit of a slog. But, as I say, the novel is also brilliant, bending the reader's mind with crazy and fascinating mixtures of fiction and reality, and keeping things interesting with a major conspiracy and plots within plots within plots. Forget double agents, this book has quadruple agents:

"It's no use your camouflaging yourself, Lotaria! If you unbutton one uniform, there's always another uniform underneath!"
Sheila looks at you with an air of challenge. "Unbutton..? Just you try...."
Now that you have decided to fight, you can't draw back. With a frantic hand you unbutton the white smock of Sheila the programmer and you discover the police uniform of Alfonsina; you rip Alfonsina's gold buttons away and you find Corinna's anorak; you pull the zipper of Corinna and you see the chevrons of Ingrid....

Because of this, however, the book can be very confusing. I feel like this was purposeful on Calvino's part, because eventually it just becomes ridiculous. There are plots nested so many times it loses all meaning, nothing is real, fake policemen ambush other fake policemen who are ambushing fake taxis, revolutionaries infiltrate a government office and end up among counter-revolutionaries who have also infiltrated, some of whom are double agent revolutionaries, etc. It just becomes impossible to follow after a while, and though confusing and thus somewhat frustrating, I do think it was intended, perhaps to exaggerate to the point of parody.

But maybe shifting beginnings of different novels and convoluted plots aren't your thing. In that case, there's plenty of "action" in this book to potentially hold your interest:

Aren't you going to resist? Aren't you going to escape? Ah, you are participating....
Ah, you fling yourself into it, too....
You're the absolute protagonist of this book, very well; but do you believe that gives you the right to have carnal relations with all the female characters?

Bad protagonist! Bad!

Anyway, this book is definitely worth checking out. It can be a bit dry, and a bit of a slog in parts, but it's also mind-bending, fun, and thought-provoking. I can safely say it's the best experimental novel I've ever read.

Highly recommended!

Ludmilla closes her book, turns off her light, puts her head back against the pillow, and says, "Turn off your light, too. Aren't you tired of reading?"
And you say, "Just a moment, I've almost finished Ethan's review of If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino."

Your recent tango with a David Mitchell novel reminds you that he wrote "Cloud Atlas" under the influence of "If on a winter's night a traveler," a book you've been meaning to read since gleaning this information. You're anticipating a slow week at work so you'll need something to stave off the excruciating boredom you expect from the days to come: You grab the book on your way out.

You arrive at your job and are, indeed, greeted by a dearth of things to do. It looks like your day is going to demand even less of your time and attention than you thought. Excellent. You get as comfortable as you can in your office and crack open your first taste of Italo Calvino.

A few pages in, you read: You are at your desk, you have set the book among your business papers... you seem to be concentrating on an examination of the papers and instead you are exploring the first pages of the novel. Gradually you settle back in the chair, you raise the book to the level of your nose, you tilt the chair, you pull out a side drawer of the desk to prop your feet on it....

The part of you that appreciates tongue-in-cheek narcissism -- a rather large part of you, really (which is probably why you'd enjoy a book written in the second person) -- snickers and would deadpan a "How does a dead man know I'm reading his novel, published five years before I was born, at work?" if you weren't certain that your coworkers already harbor doubts about your sanity that would only be exacerbated by overhearing you pose questions to yourself or, worse yet, to a book from which you're clearly expecting an equally audible answer.

You settle for keeping your chuckles to yourself and read on: But doesn't this show a lack of respect? Of respect, that is, not for your job... but for the book.

This gives you pause. You wonder, with less self-congratulatory irony coating your thoughts now: "Mr. Calvino, are you judging me from beyond the grave?"

You consider this. Ghostly criticism of your reading environment is a fate better than seven hours and fifty-four minutes of tedious inactivity, you decide.

You happily forge ahead.

As you are drawn deeper into the tale that Calvino spins, you realize that you've had an intermittent reading companion. Not an Other Reader and most assuredly not a specter nearly made solid by his own judgments, but your own dreamily intoxicated grin. The kind of unselfconsciously foolish smile often found in the throes of puppy love, the kind you reserve for the books that transport you somewhere magical.

You find this book to be a celebration of reading, writing and creative pursuits, all of which are things that you appreciate. It helps that you're the kind of person who seeks a certain kinship with fictional characters, especially those who steal your thoughts nearly verbatim from your brain. You find many of them in this book, highlighting passages and phrases and epiphanies that you recognize as your own.

As you near the end of the novel, you identify the connection linking each chapter. The dopey grin that nearly breaks your face grows wider as you read the final word, flip back through the pages in reverse and notice that your own handwriting and added notations are nearly crowding out Calvino's words.

You find this fitting.

I'm here today to speak with one of the most incisive literary critics of the 20th century, Gilbert Sorrentino, about Italo Calvino's phenomenal If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.

GR: Thanks for taking the time, Gil.

GS: My pleasure, Glenn.

GR: Simple question for starters: What makes this novel so special?

GS: If on a winter’s night a traveler, Calvino’s version (and antiversion) of the nouveau roman, fits the conditions for “proper art” proposed by Dedalus/Joyce: “The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.” It is a wonderful piece of work, labyrinthine and convoluted, informed by a deadpan humor and pastiches, imitations, and parodies of an entire battery of modern and postmodern literary techniques.

GR: And, of course, we have those striking first pages where Calvino speaks directly to you, the reader.

GS: Ah, yes. It begins with an almost conventional storyteller’s address to the reader: “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought.” We immediately see that “Italo Calvino” is somebody other than the author, and as we read, discover that “you” is not the usual foil, the time-honored figure to whom the narrator tells, in the first or third person, his story.

GR: Please say a bit more about how Calvino’s uses the “you” in the context of his narration.

GS: “You” is the second-person protagonist of the novel; and he is, above all other things, a reader. What he does, or wants to do, in chapters that detail his adventures, is read. The chapters dealing with “you” alternate with the chapters that he is reading; but through error, carelessness, chance, design, conspiracy, these chapters (ten of them) are not from the same book; they are the first chapters of ten different books, and each breaks off at the point of crisis or suspense: they are cliff-hangers.

GR: What do you think Calvino is up to here?

GS: What is Calvino up to? I think that he is doing what the practitioners of the contemporary novel have been doing for a least a quarter-century, putting into practice an idea succinctly stated - in 1923! - by the formalist critic, Victor Shklovsky: "The ideas in a literary work do not constitute its content but rather its material, and in these combinations and interrelations with other aspects of the work they create its form." The "content" of Calvino's novel is precisely the material from which he makes the form that we hold in our hands as this book.

GR: Wow! Does this mean Calvino leans on the conventions of more traditional novels?

GS: This novel's splinterings, ambiguities, contradictions, distorted mirror images, thematic variations, off-key fugues are so absolutely representative of objective reality as the linear, plotted, sequential narrative of the conventional novel, the latter as much an invention, and as totally artificial as the nouveau roman, and with the equivalent relation to objective reality: none.

GR: I suppose it gets back to readers' expectations of how a novel should use the everyday world, things like a real city or country, as the setting and have characters move about in that reality.

GS: We have learned over the years, to read the signs that a Dickens or a Conrad use, but they are only signs, manifestations of invented techniques. The books in which they are deployed use "ideas" as "material" just as Calvino does (or Beckett, or Robbe-Grillet). That we insist that Dickens' "ideas" constitute his "content" is our problem and critical failings. His novels are as strange and as artificial as the one under review. Calvino's novel more bluntly insists that the world of the book equals the world of the book. If, as Mallarmé says, "everything in the world exists to end in a book," then "everything" must stand for material, to be used by the writer to make forms that are those of literature, not reality.

GR: That's quite something. Could you say a few words about Calvino's game plan as you see it?

GS: Calvino's strategies are so numerous that I can do no more than point out a few of them: The first person narrators of the ten chapters from the ten different novels are different, yet they all have curiously similar affinities and problems; the protagonist-Reader, "you," has adventures that seem, at times, to be blurred reflections of the adventures of the ten narrators; a writer, Silas Flannery, who has (perhaps) written one (or two, or none) of the chapters that "you" reads, keeps a diary in which he writes: "I have had the idea of writing a novel composed only of beginnings of novels. The protagonist could be a Reader who is continually interrupted," and so we read a novel by "Italo Calvino" in which a novelist considers writing the novel in which he already exists; the Reader meets six other readers to whom he tells his difficulties in continuing the novels he has begun.

GR: That's amazing. And there's more, I suppose.

GS: Oh, yes. To the ten titles he adds another, suggested by the conversation, a "relic of some childish reading," that he feels should be included in the list, then gives the list to one of other readers, who reads aloud:

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 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.

GR: And at this point, what does he judge is happening here?

GS: He thinks that this is the first paragraph of the novel that "you" would like to continue but cannot find. "You" protests that these are but titles, to which the other replies: "Oh, the traveler always appeared only in the first pages and then was never mentioned again - he has fulfilled his function." This is precisely what happens to the traveler in "Calvino's" first pages, except that the traveler is not "Calvino's" traveler, but a character in a novel that a character in a novel has been reading.

GR: Fantastic! Sounds like Calvino has constructed a novel as Chinese box puzzle.

GS: All that and then some. This is a brilliant work of great imaginative power and artistic authority. With it, Calvino has, in Shklovsky's phrase, "ripped things from their ordinary sequence of associations."

GR: Thanks so much, Gil, for your rip-roaring analysis. Mind if I post this interview as part of a Goodreads review?

GS: Sure, go right ahead.


Gilbert Sorrentino, 1929-2006


Italo Calvino, 1923-1985

If on a Goodreads Review a Reader, or If a Pale Fire Starts Without Me: A Poem in Ten Lines

You are about to begin reading Junta's interactive review of If on a winter's night a traveler. Your instructions are below.

In the novel, the ten titles of the even numbered chapters form a story:

n  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?n

Reader, in this review you have the chance to create your own story. From Line #1 below, click on one of the spoilers. Then another from Line #2, Line #3 and so on until Line #10, when you'll have your own faithful ten lines, or - a poem. Leave a comment of your own unique poem that you reached, to share the literary love (I'm dying to know what tale people find) - isn't it amazing that in these humble ten lines, there lie 10^10, or ten billion different stories?

1. My Admirable butterfly! Explain Bicycle tires. A thread of subtle pain One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain The acknowledgement of being vain Emitting a waft of 7% methane But method A is agony! The brain I was the shadow of the waxwing slain Spelling imploration as she sought in vain How could you, in the gloam of Lilac Lane Of mortal life; the passion and the pain

2. By the false azure in the windowpane In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brainTo reason with the monsters in her brain Tugged at by playful death, released againThe claret taillight of that dwindling plane The unwritten song of Kurt Cobain Before the curiosity might entirely wane And inside the mind unravels, a chain In the season of the candy cane Soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain

3. Anything else? Do you need to pee? Upward hop-flop, and instantly (to-wee!) No free man needs a God; but was I free? I alone knew nothing, and a great conspiracy To the green, indigo and tawny sea While snubbing gods, including the big G A wrench, a rift – that’s all one can foresee Where are you? In the garden. I can see When tomorrow starts without me, and I’m not there to see Or this dewlap: some day I must set free

4. Returning to her perch – the new TV Books and people hid the truth from me The colours designated to A-B-C-D-E And in a jiffy our two souls would be If the sun should rise and find your eyes all filled with tears for me For emptiness and memories would take the place of me Part of your shadow near the shagbark tree In your own study, twice removed from me A thimbleful of bright metallic tea How fully I felt nature glued to me

5. And then the gradual and dual blue Throughout our high-school days I knew Or freak reincarnation: what to do And all in you is youth, and you make new I had so much to live for, so much left yet to do He said, “This is eternity and all I’ve promised you” I know how much you love me, as much as I love you “I can’t believe,” she said, “that it is you!” Meet solid bodies and glissade right through Where it would tarry for an hour or two

6. Or let a person circulate through you On suddenly discovering that you And each time that you think of me, I know you’ll miss me too Today your life on earth has passed but here life starts anew As night unites the viewer and the view It seemed almost impossible that I was leaving you Though there were times you did some things you knew you shouldn’t do “I loved your poem in the Blue Review” By quoting them, old things I made for you And while this lasted all I had to do

7. Letting thoughts flow, out of spite The crested ibis’ inveterate plight In terms of combinational delight That first long ramble, the relentless light And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white “If you’re not sleeping, let’s turn on the light” Revolving in the torrid prairie night A nymph came pirouetting, under white And finally there was the sleepless night A dull dark white against the day’s pale white

8. And abstract larches in the neutral light When I decided to explore and fight Rotating petals, in a vernal rite And, from the outside, bits of coloured light “I hate that wind! Let’s play some chess.” “All right” And through the flowing shade and ebbing light The flock of sails (one blue among the white) And if my private universe scans right The clouds of doubt taking flight “You are authorised to shoot, upon sight”

9. What moment in the gradual decay The regular vulgarian, I daresay But always present, ran through me. One day Now form a triptych or a three-act play Jane Dean, my typist, offered her one day In the strange world where I was a mere stray Off Hesperus; your gesture of dismay That tasteless venture helped me in a way I wish so much you wouldn’t cry the way you did today Another winter was scrape-scooped away

10. Does resurrection choose? What year? What day? Being happier: he sees the Milky Way. When I’d just turned eleven, as I lay. (Your eyes and mine not meeting) “She should play.” In which portrayed events forever stay. And presently I saw it melt away. I came across what seemed a twin display. On running out of cigarettes; the way. The Toothwort White haunted our woods in May. While thinking of the many things we didn’t get to say.

"Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death."
You stop for a moment to reflect on these words. Then, in a flash, you decide you want to...

Reader, what story will you write in your life?



January 26, 2016



Credits: 77 of the lines were taken from the title poem in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, with several slight alterations;
12 of the lines were taken from this poem;
10 of the lines were mine; and
1 line was taken from Calvino's novel.

P.S. For another interactive review with spoilers, read this one.