For this woman…reading means stripping herself of every purpose, every foregone conclusion, to be ready to catch a voice that makes itself heard when you least expect it, a voice that comes from an unknown source, from somewhere beyond the book, beyond the author, beyond the conventions of writing; from the unsaid, from what the world has not yet said of itself and does not yet have the words to say.

This book is the rarest of love songs: a polyphonic hymn to the Reader.

I loved this book so much! Instead of some cold intellectual puzzle I found a sexy, suspenseful, romantic — and intellectual — comedy. And at its serious heart, amidst the swirling constellations of narrative, literary references and playful acrobatics of form, the most ancient human story: a love story between a man and a woman — the story that, throughout literary history, represents affirmation of the continuity of life.



With billions and billions of Other Reviews out there already, I’ll leave it at that.

********************
First painting: The Magdalen Reading (1438) – Rogier van der Weyden
Second painting: The Bed (Le Lit) - Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Please don't ask me what this novel is about, for my interpretation will differ from yours. But if you are the kind of reader who would prefer to be lost in a maze of beautiful words, do embrace it; I guarantee that you'll be enchanted. But let me warn you, not to look for a traditional plot-driven story here, for that's not the intention of Calvino. He is a post-modernist who loves to experiment. Maybe you are beginning to get some idea now what kind of a novel this would be. If not anything else, it's an experimental novel. I hope this revelation will not dampen your enthusiasm.

Let me be of some assistance here, to help you navigate through this novel without getting completely lost in its interlaced maze. I hope my voluntary offer of assistance, to give you a helping hand here, will not offend your self-assurance. Now and then, one reader's perspective on a complicated piece of literature may ease another's path through it. But if you are an egoistic reader, like the reader in Calvino's novel, please ignore me. You are free to form your own opinion.

For you who are willing to listen, I'd say that this work is the weirdest that I have come across in my literary journey. I've read experimental novels before, but nothing quite like this. Calvino begins his novel by introducing an ordinary reader who goes to a bookstore to pick up his latest work - If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. He buys the book; reads it; and finds it's incomplete with only the first chapter. He goes back to the bookstore to inform them of this error, and there he learns that due to an error in binding, several copies of two different books have been mixed up. The bookshop replaces the errored copy with a new one, only that the new copy is a completely different story. The ordinary reader meets another reader in this ensuing mess, and together, as well as independently, they try to find the "one book" that they want to read, which is If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Sounds confusing? I bet. Let me simplify it. When you read Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, what you read is two readers' quest to find a complete version of a book that they've begun to read, and the first chapters of several novels that they come across in their quest. Does it spark your interest? I hope so. It did mine when I figured it out.

That's all I can say about the structure. But if you are interested to learn more, I'd love to share some of my own views here with you. From what I have already shared, it is understood that this novel is not a plot-driven story. What Calvino does here is challenge the reader's expectation of a traditional straightforward plot. Calvino believed in no perfect style of writing a novel, nor did he believe that a story should have a completion or a structural accuracy. The reason may be his need for cohesion between reality and fiction. In real life, often our stories are incomplete, and we are disappointed in them. And why don't we have the same in fiction? Why write fantastical stories with completed endings and traditional happily ever afters, when they, more times than one, are mere illusions? Calvino creates stories within stories, entangling us in a complicated web just like in real life. And through all these complications, he points to us that there is after all only one story, which is the continuation of previously told stories.

When you have finally finished reading If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, you will understand that the climax of the story is not its orthodox ending (for despite Calvino's protestations against tradition, he has thought fit to find refuge in an orthodox ending), but the disclosure that when you connect the titles of the unfinished stories a coherent paragraph is born, which can be interpreted either literary or philosophically according to your preference will elucidate the meaning of the novel that you've been searching for. The dawning comprehension will leave you in awe, and you'll certainly agree that Calvino is a genius of his time.

The novel hypnotized me. If, however, you conclude that it is nonsensical, be it; I'll still say that I was thoroughly captivated by Calvino's beautiful nonsense. His words enthralled me. This is not an easy reading experience, but not daunting either, for Calvino has adopted a playful style. Yet, if you care to pay attention, you won't miss the deeply running philosophical thoughts of Calvino which are truly thought-provoking.

I hope now I have imparted to you enough information on If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. It is time for you to embark on the journey, yourself. Good luck! I hope you'll find it enjoyable.

More of my reviews can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/

Čitanje je samoća.

Književna romansa. Nepovezanost. Prostranstvo književnog svijeta. Sklapanje.

Kakvim se superlativima Kalvino može okititi, a da oni budu svježi, ne otrcani? Ova knjiga se bavi knjigom. Autor se na svojstven način suočava sa potragom za čitanjem, poteškoćama u potrazi za knjigama. "Ako jedne zimske noći neki putnik" je knjiga koja je izobličena i njeni junaci dobijaju kopiju i slažu je pomoću zasebnih priča. Ono što mi je bilo naročito fascinantno jeste posjeta biblioteci jednog od junaka te nemogućnosti da se iznajmi knjiga, vještina izvlačenja, prefinjeni govori bibliotekara kako baš ta knjiga nije trenutno na stanju jeste nešto što zaista izaziva smjeh, porinuće u gotovo nezamislivo, poigravanje sa realnošću. Previše je bizarnih momenata u knjizi, na neki šaljiv način oni naginju prema nadrealnom.

Teško je smisliti širinu kojom ovaj roman dejstvuje s obzirom da se one granaju i jedna drugu dodiruju, a opet one su nove, autentične svaka po sebi; gdje jedna stane, druga nastavi, i kao da postoji mogućnost da jedna od tih širina bude uhvaćena, ali one nekekako izmiču, sve dok ne budu na okupu u jednom kotlu kada se u konačnom dobija smisao rečenog. A onda smisao počinje da izmiče. Rečenice su posebno dizajnirane, gdje je pretpostavljam, Kalvino izvodio facijalne ekspresije dok ih je ostavljao na papir uočavajući da je ova knjiga ili bolje rečeno više knjiga, jedan eksperiment zapravo. Obraća se čitaocu, a onda uđe u ulogu čitaoca i piše iz drugog lica množine tako dočaravajući reakciju njihove reakcije, preplićući i ukrštajući njihove sudbine unutar čitanja. Inovativno dijelo.

“I rather enjoy that sense of bewilderment a novel gives you when you start reading it.”

[ 1 ]

“You are about to begin reading” Cecily’s review of her first Calvino. “Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on… Find the most comfortable position… Adjust the light so you won’t strain your eyes… Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading.” A drink within reach? “Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.” Check your screen is at the right angle, or maybe you prefer to print and hold the review as you read it. “It’s not that you expect anything in particular from this” review. “You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.”

The Book of Sand

A travelling salesman sells a holy book from India: “neither sand nor this book has a beginning or an end”. It is written in an unknown script, with occasional illustrations, and ever-changing, non-sequential page numbers. “If space is infinite, we are anywhere, at any point in space. If time is infinite, we are at any point in time.” The buyer fears theft, but also the possible discovery that the book is not actually infinite. He becomes an obsessive recluse: the book is monstrous, and so is he - like Gollum and his “precious”. He considers burning it, but…

[ 2 ]

You have now read a few lines and “you’re becoming caught up in the story. At a certain point you remark… ‘this whole passage reads like something I’ve read before’… there are themes that recur, the text is interwoven with these reprises.” The sequence seems wrong. Maybe you’re reading the wrong review of the wrong book. This is outrageous. Maybe it will sort itself out in the next section.

Before the Law

A man comes seeking justice, and the door to justice is open, but the doorkeeper won't let him pass. There is never an outright "no", nor any reason given, just prevarication and the implication (and it is only an implication) that one day it might be possible. The man waits, and waits. The doorkeeper takes bribes, just "so you won't feel there isn't anything you haven't tried." Eventually…

[ 3 ]

What’s going on? Yet another review mixed up with this one. You’re confused.

Time to explain – a little.

One Novel, Parts of Many Novels, or a Short Story Collection?

This is a book about readers and reading, and about writers and writing; it is also written as an example of what it describes (a synecdoche?) and how I started this review.

Calvino mentions "the Oriental tradition" where one story stops "at the moment of greatest suspense" and then narrative switches to another story, perhaps by the protagonist picking up a book and reading it. He also has a character with “the idea of writing a novel composed only of the beginnings of novels”. That happens here - and in a well-known book by a self-described Calvino fan, Cloud Atlas. See David Mitchell on Calvino.

In Chapter 1, the narrator is excited to start reading the latest Calvino book. The next chapter has a title rather than a number and is (about) what he reads. But he reaslises it’s the wrong book, so in Chapter 2, he takes it back to the bookshop to exchange it. The next chapter is what he reads, but again, it’s the wrong book… Repeat and repeat.

You end up with the “real” numbered chapters (musing on books, reading, the female Other Reader he idolises (Ludmilla), and a weird publishing conspiracy to hide/remove books and also use computerised ghost writers), alternating with the partial books he’s reading. The framing story is (mostly) written in the second person singular, addressing me - as a man. Although second person narration is rare, and I’m female, somehow it worked.

As if that’s not enough, there is also an artist, Irnerio, who makes recursive art from books – which are then published as books themselves – even though he has cultivated the art of learning not to read (by looking at words intensely, until they disappear).

And on top of that, there is influencing the other way round: some of the chapters within this novel could almost be Jorge Luis Borges or Kafka short stories, with falsified documents, recursion and reflection, doubles, a kind of labyrinth, playing with time and space, paradoxes, and confused bureaucracy and justice. “Either write a book that could be the unique book… or write all books.” Or in Borges’ world, combine the two.

I make notes as I read. On this occasion, I wrote on the pages in the wrong order - not deliberately, but it was entirely appropriate.

Chapter Titles

Chapters are alternately numbered and titled. The sequence of the titled ones suggest yet another story, but each story in those chapters is self-contained and incomplete, although often connected to one of the others, by having characters sharing a surname, for example:

If on a winter’s night a traveler
Espionage: suitcase swap, smoky station, mistaken identity. A cypher for the book itself?

Outside the town of Malbork
”An odor of frying wafts at the opening of the page”, coupled with a woman (Brigd) kneading dough, more intrigue/escape, family fights.

Leaning from the steep slope
A stranger sees signs in everything, whether that be people, buildings, the weather – or a prisoner’s hand extending from a window. He talks to a woman who goes into the prison, apparently to draw a particular prisoner, even though she prefers drawing inanimate objects (e.g. an anchor, with the ambiguity of staying or going). He also deputises – secretly - for a meteorologist who is going away in suspicious circumstances.

Without fear of wind or vertigo
Alex and Irena and Valerian, a secret mission to identify a spy, revolution and counter revolution, betrayal, plus a coercive threesome and someone finding their own death warrant.

Looks down in the gathering shadow
A change of tone: there’s still mystery, but this has a comic angle too, as a couple attempt to dispose of a body, pausing for sex.

In a network of lines that enlace
A paranoid passer by hears an incessantly ringing phone in an empty house. He answers it and is learns of a hostage/blackmail.

In a network of lines that intersect
A man loves kaleidoscopes and wants a room of mirrors, and numerous body doubles, to confuse potential assassins. Very Borgesian.

On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon
A Japanese erotic story, focusing on the intensity of every element of a sensation.

Around an empty grave
A son finally hears a little about his estranged mother, as his father is dying, so he sets off to find her family, and maybe her.

What story down there awaits its end?
The protagonist is trying “mentally erasing” everything and everyone but Franzisca (a nod to Franz Kafka?). He picks up a piece of paper with the title of this chapter on it, and then… the end?.

Books are a Dialogue Between Writer and Reader, and Between Readers

The framing story focuses on “you” (i.e. me, the Reader) and the Other Reader – a woman. “Your reading is no longer solitary… the novel to be read is superimposed by a possible novel to be lived… Does this mean that the book has become an instrument, a channel of communication, a rendezvous?” It sometimes seems that way on GoodReads: “That communion of inner rhythm that is achieved through a book’s being read at the same time by two people.”

It also explores the relationship between a writer and a reader-cum-muse: “Readers are my vampires”, but more positively, “I read in her face what she desires to read”. Who is the true author then? On the other hand, “What does the name of an author on the jacket matter?” Would you feel betrayed if you found a book by an author you like had been ghostwritten, and if not, what if it were ghostwritten not by another author, but by a clever algorithm?

Ghostwritten and “you can’t distinguish the fibers of the weave” in different, but connected, stories remind me of David Mitchell again (see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

“Each new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings” echoes Borges’s infinite books, and that echo is then relayed by David Mitchell in his idea of an uber-novel.

The fictitious writer, Silas Flannery, tries to tackle his writer’s block by copying out the opening sentence of Crime and Punishment… and then the next, and the next. “The copyist lived simultaneously in two temporal dimensions, that of reading and that of writing.” Recursion, again.

Books are Sexy

“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.”

I wasn’t too sure what to expect from this book, but nobody told me how sexual it was – not so much when it was actually describing sex (much of which is a not exactly vanilla:  beside a dead body, a couple of threesomes (one coercive), daughter and husband watching mother/wife with daughter’s suitor, sexual assault), but the far more numerous and lengthy passages when it’s allegedly talking about something else altogether.

The lure of a new book, the foreplay of unwrapping it as you experience its touch and smell, before “you prepare to penetrate its secrets”. “The pleasures derived from a paper knife are tactile, auditory, visual, and especially mental.” As it cuts and slashes, there is a “cheery crackling [as] the good paper receives that first visitor.” “In the depth of the volume”, it finds the whiteness of virginal blank sheets. The “rumpled”, “smoothing”, “clipping” of oral translation just oozes, whilst being superficially innocuous enough to read to a maiden aunt!

“The most submissive abandonment, the exploration of the immensity of strokable and reciprocally stroking spaces, the dissolving of one’s being in a lake whose surface is infinitely tactile.”

Other Quotes

•tUnbought books “looked at you, with the bewildered gaze of dogs who… see a former companion go off on the leash of his master, come to rescue him.”

•t“The sentences continue to move in vagueness.”

•t“There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning.”

•t“The echo of a vanished knowledge revealed in the penumbra and in tacit illusions.”

•t“You sense the story arriving like the still-vague thunder.”

•t“To fly is the opposite of travel; you cross a gap in space… then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.”

•t“Literature’s worth lies in its power of mystification, in mystification it has its truth; therefore a fake, as a mystification of a mystification, is tantamount to truth squared.”

•t“The author of every book is a fictitious character whom the existent author invents to make him the author of his fictions.”

•t“The story adjusts its gait to the slow progress of the iron-bound hoofs on climbing paths, toward a place that contains the secret of the past and of the future, which contains time coiled around itself.”

•t“Reading means stripping herself of every purpose… to be ready to catch a voice… when you least expect it.”

“At every rereading I seem to be reading a new book for the first time. Is it I who keep changing… Or is reading a construction?”

How can I write a review for this thing when I do not even know exactly what I’ve read?

Italo Calvino is one of the most notable members of the Oulipo movement. According to Wikipedia “the group defines the term littérature potentielle as (rough translation): "the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy". Queneau described Oulipians as "rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape." These definitions explains pretty well what Calvino tried to do with his novel. The novel alternates a numbered chapter written in 2nd person POV with a titled chapter which each represents the beginning of another novel. The main characters in the numbered chapters are The Reader and the Other Reader, a woman. The Reader buys the newest novel by Italo Calvino, starts to read the beginning and then realises his copy is faulty and the beginning repeats several times. When he goes back to the bookstore to have his copy replaced he encounters the other Reader who has the same problem. Somehow, they end up starting another novel they cannot finish and so on. The plot becomes more and more convoluted and surreal as the novel advances. It manages to include a peculiar love story, an international conspiracy, bookish criminal organizations, imagined countries and languages that became extinct, novels that change their content and money other weird stuff.

I started the novel in Italian and as the plot got more complicated, I had to switch to the English translation. The translation was well done and made the language transition seamless. I had fun with this novel although I had to concentrate to make sense of it. I lost patience towards the end but I am satisfied that I read it and I definitely plan to try more by the author.

First there was an intriguing title ... What could this book be about? Myths, legends, fairytales? Horror, thriller, fantasy?
Then there were references to the same book in reviews of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, followed shortly by other mentions in relation to Catherynne Valente and her Orphan Tales. I loved both these titles, so I had to find out what the connection to Calvino is.

Well, now I know: they are indeed related, and yet unlike each other. They could all three be called gimmicky, metafictional, transgenre, postmodernist, deconstructive and so on, yet Mitchell could be resumed as an exploration of the nature of power and morality, Valente as an extrapolation of The Arabian Nights to include Russian and other exotic folktales. Calvino is more difficult to pin down. I borrowed the Escher reference from David Mitchell, because it aptly desribes the baffling nature of the journey following the footsteps of the mysterious winter traveler:


Basically, Calvino writes an essay on the nature of reading and writing books. There are 10 stories that start and get interrupted in the middle of a scene; there is a reference to Arabian Nights, but you will need to reach the last chapter to get at its meaning...

I said the magic word: YOU. I don't remember reading another story written in the second person, direct POV. You don't actually read this book, this books reads You! I mean ME. I'm actually a character in the narrative, right from the first page, when "I" venture into the bookstore to pick up the latest novel by Italo Calvino. He, the author, knows all my peculiar habits and quirks, all my expectations and all my preferences when it comes to the written word. The scene is both hilarious and heart touching, witness the first quote bellow my review, and this passage describing how I leave the store once I/You picked the novel:

'you cast another bewildered look at the books around you (or, rather: it was the books that looked at you, with the bewildered gaze of dogs who, from their cages in the city pound, see a former companion go off on the leash of his master, come to rescue him), and out you went.

The author himself will lose no time in inserting himself and his views into the story, directly addressing the Reader, playing with my/your expectations, sabotaging the narrative flow every time I/you get caught up in one of the fragmented stories comprising the novel. The intermissions get longer and longer, taking over the plot until The Reader / Me / You gets entangled into a veritable labyrinth of misdirections, false starts, unreliable witnessess and confusing leads. For all the obstructions and the smokescreens thrown into the path of sequential reading, every step is deliberate and carefully plotted. At one point, the novel's structure is compared to one of those toys in which pieces of coloured plastic are rearranged by the tap of a finger:

Kaleidoscopes and other catoptric instruments, a 'polydiptic theater', in which about sixty little mirrors lining the inside of a large box transform a bough into a forest, a lead soldier into an army, a booklet into a library. [...] These pages that I am writing should also transmit a cold luminosity, as in a mirrored tube, where a finite number of figures are broken up and turned upside down and multiplied. If my figure sets out in all directions and is doubled at every corner, it is to discourage those who want to pursue me.

In another place, the mystery is explained as the result of an overaboundance of ideas:

I'm producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some other occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first, and so, setting out from any moment or place, you encounter always the same density of material to be told. In fact, looking in perspective at everything I am leaving out of the main narration, I see something like a forest that extends in all directions and is so thick that it doesn't allow light to pass: a material, in other words much richer than what I have chosen to put in the foreground this time, so it is not impossible that the person who follows my story may feel himself a bit cheated , seeing that the stream is dispersed into so many trickles, and that of the essential events only the last echoes and reverberations arrive at him; but it is not impossible that this is the very effect I aimed at when I started narrating, or let's say it's a trick of the narrative art that I am trying to employ, a rule of discretion that consists in maintaining my position slightly below the narrative posibilities at my disposal.

The metaphors are piled on one another, seductive and mystifying in turns:

The novel I would most like to read at this moment should have as its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life on you, simply allowing you to observe its own growth, like a tree, an entangling, as if of branches and leaves.

I / You / We are slowly guided away from the pleasure of reading into the realms of extracting meaning from the amorphous mass of untold tales, into the metaphysics of the written word, like a medieval knight on a quest for the Holy Grail:

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. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest - for example the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both - must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.

or, Reading is going towards something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be

Romance will finds its way onto the pages, with the introduction of The Other Reader ( To be sure, without a female character, the Reader's journey would loose liveliness ) . True or false, I cannot testify if the author's assertion that as a Reader I want to seduce every single feminine character in the novels I read, but I can fully subscribe to his depiction of love, physical love included, as the process of reading the other person : 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.

Understanding comes also from inspecting the habitat of The Other Reader (Ludmilla), passing the second personal "You" into the next character's hands, like the relay stick in a flat race:

You appeared for the first time to the Reader in a bookshop; you took shape, detaching yourself from a wall of shelves, as if the quantity of books made the presence of a young lady Reader necessary. Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast towards the outside, towards the world that interest you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

the flights of fancy go even further in the investigation of You / Me / Ludmilla:

Obviously you have the habit of reading several books at the same time, you choose different things to read for the different hours of the day, the various corners of your home, cramped as it is : there are books meant for the bedside table, those that find their place by the armchair, in the kitchen, in the bathroom.
It could be an important feature to be added to your portrait: your mind has interior walls that allow you to partition different times in which to stop and flow, to concentrate alternately on different channels. Is this enough to say you would like to live several lives simultaneously? Or that you actually do live them? That you separate your life with one person or in one environment from your life with others, elsewhere? That in every experience you take for granted a dissatisfaction that can be redeemed only in the sum of all dissatisfactions?
This suspicion is insinuated into your mind, to feed your anxiety as a jealous man who still doesn't recognize himself as such. Ludmilla, herself reader of several books at once, to avoid being caught by the disappointment that any story might cause her, tends to carry forward, at the same time, other stories also ...

I know my review is oversaturated with quotes, but I did my best to restrain myself, only to stumble on another noteworthy passage with each turning of the page. It is that kind of book, that you could dissect at leisure in bookclubs, literary magazines or academic circles, yet remains vibrant and convincing, for all the twists and turns I was subjected to. Here's how Calvino explores the interraction between two readers:

Reading is solitude. To you Ludmilla appears protected by the valves of the open book like an oyster in its shell [...] One reads alone, even in another's presence. [...] Does the relationship between one Reader and the Other Reader remain that of two separate shells, which can communicate only through partial confrontations of two exclusive experiences?
You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others' words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other.


Am I reaching YOU yet, or am I blowing in the wind? So far, we had The Reader, The Other Reader, now it's time for the Writer to take center stage. He takes many guises, this Agent of Mystification, from the mythical Father of Stories, continuouusly narrating every known story before a campfire, under a starry night; to a Counterfeiter Machine electronically rearranging the building blocks of popular themes and styles; to secret organizations fighting to get their hands on the ultimate manuscript containing the ultimate truth; to alien creatures trying to communicate with Earth by subliminally entering the words into the writer's brain, to parables extracted from the Koran about the sanctity and imovability of the written word.

Like Ludmilla, I am of the opinion that it is better to separate the author from the finished product and to let him abscond into his ivory tower( it's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books ) . Yet I got caught in the tribulations of Silas Flannery, presumptive author of the truncated stories pushing the plot forward. It is here where I felt Italo Calvino stops reading Me / You, and starts reading Himself:

In a deck chair, on the terrace of a chalet in the valley, there is a young woman reading. Every day, before starting work, I pause a moment to look at her with the spyglass. In this thin, transparent air I feel able to perceive in her unmoving form the signs of that invisible movement that reading is, the flow of gaze and breath, but, even more, the journey of the words through the person, their course or their arrest, their spurts, delays, pauses, the attention concentrating or straying, the returns, the journey that seems uniform and on the contrary is always shifting and uneven. [...] How many years since I could allow myself some disinterested reading? How many years has it been since I could abandon myself to a book written by another, with no relation to what I must write myself? I turn and and see the desk waiting for me, the typewriter with a sheet of paper rolled into it, the chapter to begin. Since I have become a slave laborer of writing, the pleasure of reading has finished for me. What I do has as its aim the spiritual state of this woman in the deck chair framed by the lens of my spyglass, and it is a condition forbidden me.

In a confessional mood, the trickster is not above some reccursive self-referencing, like the snake Ouroboros eating his own tail:

"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 ..." sendimg Me / You back to the first page of the book.

Instead of going back to the start, how about I find a way to close my remarks, without spoiling the end for other readers who would love to wander through this crazy Escher-style maze of a novel. Calvino himself thinks it's about time:
Reader, it is time for your tempest-tossed vessel to come to port. What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
then:
putting behind you pages lacerated by intellectual analyses, you dream of rediscovering a condition of natural reading, innocent, primitive ... , the same condition that is unattainable to Flannery and that we all remember from the first stories our parents read to us.

I am not only giving the 5 star treatment to this book, I will add it to my favorites for the way it speaks directly of my own experiences with reading and loving books (and I promise, this is the last quote I will launch your way):

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 to 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 to 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.

Intrigued by the title, one day I opened this book, didn't get it, put it back, saw it again years later, did the same thing, stumbled upon it again years later with a sense of déjà vu, read no more than a few pages. For some reason, it seemed as impenetrable as Hegel. But the title was stuck in my head like a pop song. That unfinished sentence bothered me, yet I would not play into the gimmick and read it just to find out what the fragment meant. I determined to put it off forever. This was before I realized Calvino had written Cosmicomics. Another title I adored by accident, fancied the title again, stumbled upon it years later, but I still resisted his quirky cheekiness. Almost broke down and read this one then. But didn't.

A decade passed, I was sitting in a rental car office. It would be a few hours. There was a bookstore down the street. I walked there, found this book within thirty seconds on the shelf for 2$, purchased it. Read it within 3 hours like a person possessed. Part of that time I was sitting in the rental car. Inhaling the ineptly concealed lingering scent of tobacco smoke. Reclining in the vaguely stained cloth seat. I felt like a slice of toast left in the toaster for three weeks. Somehow drove home, stumbled inside. I couldn't shake the surreal, otherworldly daze with which I was plagued.

Calvino, sitting in a room, typing the segments separately, shuffling papers, retyping, rearranging. Writing a novel like this should not result in a readable conglomeration. But it does. Crafting, playing games with the reader, goofing off. That was my first impression. But I kept coming back to it. Flipping it open, mulling over the elegant, irreverent quirkiness. I sympathized with the character's search for a haunting book. Its atmosphere of heady grief infected me. It was the principal of the thing. The search for a title was the search for a book, which became more books. Doesn't the author's duty include closure, explanation, justification? Can an author really just write whatever they want, without regard to the reader's puny intellect? Unless I approach it as a study, a departure, an experiment. I wasn't used to thinking this way back then. Each book within the book was composed of sections of dissimilar books, but when put together you had the story of a book, of an adventure in textual manipulation, and a novelistic tongue-twister. It was as precise as the Golden Ratio. I had been manipulated, tricked. Calvino had planted a seed of carnivalesque whirlpools in my mind, thoughts invoking memories, spiraling into a labyrinth. It is eerily geometric, and reading the partial interludes is like dividing segments of a ruler in half, until you reach the Planck scale and your phantom ruler phases out of existence. You never reach the conclusion, but you enter into each layer Inception-wise, with the hope and joy of discovering a book, its world, its philosophy, which is normally gift-wrapped between two covers. Calvino offers up a Chinese finger-trap, where on the inside of the trap you feel other, tiny, stroking fingers. At least, I felt trapped by If on a Winter's Night a Traveler... A traveler you become, and like his knights and cities, this novel reveals hidden isles, provokes the unlikely kinds of thoughts you only encounter in fleeting corridors of strained meditation, pathological tightrope walking between the abysses of insanity and genius.

Calvino proves that traditional structure is only a limitation. Beginning, middle and end are repellent concepts, false securities. He channels Borges, who was afraid to write a novel, because of the can of worms such bold experiment unleashes. To find out if you are a Calvino fan peel back the pages and slowly wrap your head around his whimsical conceptual design, if you can, if you have enough wrapping, and if you find yourself lacking, try his meteoric Comics, his stellar stories. He is dungeon master, professor, and explorer of lost dimensions. This book is a floating waterfall. A spectacle, a bottomless well, a specter and a...

But, of course, you’ve clicked to reveal the Review, because whether you’ve read If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler isn’t the thing, you’ve been invited here by the Reviewer to discuss his Review, and if you’ve anything to say about it, you’ll of course need to have first read it. You’ve checked your watch again, and he’s now twenty-three minutes late to this dingy pub in a part of town you wouldn’t typically frequent. “Another pint?” the bartender shouts at you from across the pub – a place empty except for you at this corner table, reading from your laptop. You’ve had two, a third might make you hazy, and you’ve decided anyway that if the Reviewer doesn’t show up soonish that you’re leaving. You shake your head to his offer and ask instead to the direction of the toilets. He points without real specificity somewhere to your right. Leaving your belongings, you head down the hall and are confronted with two doors. One says Fixer. The other says  

And of course you’ve chosen the door that says Spoiler, it seems the most appropriate name for what goes on here. It’s a hopeless place, as most pub toilets are, and there is a man in here that is leaning against the hands air-dryer like he has been there for an age. You’ve not seen him come through the pub, so he’s been here for at least half an hour, and he looks the worse for wear inhaling the fetid air in this room. “There you are,” he says to you as you walk in. “I was about to give up on you.” You ask if he is the Reviewer, mentioning at the same time that suggesting to meet in a pub toilet is much different than suggesting to meet in a pub. “No, I ain’t him,” the man replies gruffly. “I was supposed to come here to take you to him. He couldn’t make it and asked me to come pick you up instead.” It still doesn’t make sense why he’s here in the toilet, but before you can protest further he tells you to do your business and then meet him at his car in front of the pub. So you do your business, collect your things from the pub table, and exit the bar to see a cherry red, street racing vehicle sporting illegal enhancements to its chassis. The Reviewer’s man is leaning against the  

on the rear of the car in a pose of impatience as if he’s been there for hours. He must be one of the world’s great leaners. “Get in,” he says as he enters the car himself. You race through the streets like you’re on the lam, and to distract yourself from the fear of this car ride ending in metallic violence you ask the man if he’s ever read the Reviewer’s Review of If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. “Not much of a reader myself,” he replies as he makes a hairpin turn around a corner, narrowly missing a group of businessmen crossing the street – who now hurl insults at your retreating form. “We’re nearly to his flat and you can speak to him about his Review yourself.” Seconds later you screech to a seatbelt groaning halt in front of a nondescript apartment building and emerge from the car as one disgorged from a rollercoaster seat the moment before the ride collapses. “Second floor, flat number seven, key is under the mat,” the leaner shouts from the interior of the car and then accelerates away from the curb in an acrid blue cloud of laid rubber. The flat looks like no one has been here for months. You open your laptop and connect to Goodreads to hopefully read the Review before meeting the Reviewer when your stomach begins to growl in earnest. You go to the kitchen, thinking the Reviewer wouldn’t mind if you were to nosh on a morsel here, given all that you’ve been put through today. You open the refrigerator and are assaulted by a wave of putrefaction. At some point during the Reviewer’s absence the electricity to the flat must have gone out because the appliance has gone from a device of cold storage to one of warm decay; the Meat Drawer smells of a Meat Wagon, its Crisper now a  

and as you’re attempting to settle your rising gorge the front door to the flat opens. At last, you think, now we can get on with it, this Review, but before you can say anything a surly burly man bursts in and shouts, “Right, where is he then?” You explain that you just got here, that you aren’t his friend, that you let yourself in with the key under the mat and as you speak the words you realize how ridiculous they all sound. “He hasn’t been here in months,” the surly burly man interrupts you. “If he doesn’t pay all the rent he owes by Friday, he’s out. You tell him that when you see him!” He exits as suddenly as he entered, returning you to the empty apartment. This is too much, really, and you’ve decided it’s time to ditch this Review and its Reviewer. You leave the flat, not even bothering to lock it, and head down the street to a pastry shop you remember passing in a vehicular blur some few minutes ago. A croissant and black coffee in hand - you haven’t even had the first sip or the first bite, when a man smiling like a cat with all the cream takes an uninvited seat at your table, extends his hand in greeting, and says “At last we meet.” You limply shake his hand and let him know all that you have suffered over the last hour just to discuss this ridiculous Review. “Well, what did you think?” the Reviewer asks excitedly. You are so irritated at the entire situation that you say that frankly, you haven’t even finished reading it. The Reviewer doesn’t look shocked or annoyed. He’s waived over to the table the little man behind the counter that served you your croissant and coffee. As he puts in an order for a bun and a tea; without a pause he returns to his conversation with you and encourages you to take out your laptop and finish reading the Review, that he doesn’t want to accidentally reveal any  

“Spoiler?!” the little pastry man shouts. “I don’t even know her!” He cackles horribly out of a maw of misshapen teeth, slaps the Reviewer on the back and heads off to retrieve his order. The Reviewer arches his eyebrows, smiles wanly, watches you read.

Reading is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world. The conclusion to which all stories come is that the life of a person has led is one and one alone, uniform and compact as a shrunken blanket where you can’t distinguish the fibers of the weave. The pleasure of seeing things from a distance and narrating them as what is past. Every void continues in the void, every gap, even a short one, opens onto another gap, every chasm empties into the infinite abyss.

You shrug as if to say That’s it? The Reviewer looks at you eagerly, almost shivering in anticipation. “Well, come on then, what did you think?” he asks. You explain to him that what he’s written isn’t a Review at all. It’s only an amalgamation of lines directly quoted from If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler and shoved together to make something less than sense. He furrows his brow, says, “Well that’s the best I could do.” You respond that even though this might indeed be the case, his review is not a Review. A hodgepodge of quotes requires an explanation - the Reviewer’s thoughts, his sage reflections on what he’s read. “Aha!” the Reviewer shouts. “That’s where you’re completely wrong. For if you’ve read it, you know that it is impossible to write a Review of If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler.

يقال أنها من أجمل ١٠٠ رواية في تاريخ الرواية الحداثي وأرى أنها رواية مقعرة متحذلقة لا تنتمي إلى رؤية ولا حالة سردية حقيقية ...قصص مبتورة كي يجعلك الكاتب تستشف ما يخمن... لا يريد أن يكتب لك يريد أن يختبر صبرك ونفاذه أمام ما يهذي به
من بداية النص تشعر كأن الكاتب يريد أن يلقي بك إلى غياهب الحيرة ويتشدق الكاتب في طيات الكتاب هانذا استطعت أو أوصلك معي للصفحة الكذا ...أحياناً ينتابني شعور بأن بعض القراء لا يجرؤا على الاعتراف بهراء ما يكتب فقط لأن صيت الكاتب أو الكتاب عالمياً قد رفعه السماء
رواية مملة..

I wonder why this is my third Italo Calvino book and want to kick myself. I should have read this first even though his Cosmicomics is more my speed in general. Gaah!

That being said, there's something awesomely lulling and beguiling and downright charming about this book. It reads wonderfully and with such a light touch that you can't help but feel as if you're riding in a giant's careful hand, a soft but omnipresent voice telling you where you're going and what you'll be experiencing and that you really shouldn't be surprised that you're going to be dropped into one opening novel after another after another, beckoning back to previous novels and forward again, all of which are fascinating and provoking, sexual or paranoid, driving you forward until the count of ten.

That's right. Ten novels in one. That's just how Italo Calvino rolls.

But don't think this is hard to get through! Oh, no! This alway has a helpful fouth-wall-breaking hand to guide you on your way, with a constant theme of self-reference that often goes off the deep end of metaphysics but doesn't really. After all, the novel is only referring to the nature of itself.

What is its nature? It is ten novels in one, always starting, never ending... a story within a story within a story.

I love this stuff. Like, big time. Total meta-fiction, but so damn charming and carefully crafted and often dreamlike and firmly plotted, or anti-plotted, to excite and titillate and then draw back and return once more to the idea that

THIS IS NOT THE NOVEL YOU WERE LOOKING FOR. :)

You know, just like the droids.

And yet, it always is the novel you were looking for, fake within fake within fake and always turning back in upon the central theme that makes this so special: Books. Stories. Truth hidden deep, a story like an onion that can be peeled over and over and yet remains always the same.

I can honestly say I'm thrilled to have read this. It's probably the most accessible post-modern novel I've ever read and it's a comfortable and comforting ride all the way through despite the sense of uneasiness that the author intends to project upon us. Or maybe that's just me. I like labyrinths, after all. :)

Damn fine read.

لو أن مسافرا في ليلة شتاء

بهذا الكتاب وحده، دخل كالفينو قائمة كتابي المفضلين، نادي مجانين السرد الذين يقلبون كيانك بكتاباتهم، أظهر كالفينو كل قدراته وكل سخريته في هذه الرواية، ها هو يصنع عملاً مبهراً، عن فن القراءة وعن فن الكتابة معاً، نوع من ألف ليلة وليلة معاصرة، حيث يقفز القارئ من قصة إلى قصة من دون أن يدرك نهاية لأي منها، وكل قصة لا تفضي إلى قصة كما هو الحال في ألف ليلة وليلة، وإنما كل قصة تبتر بسبب غباء وتلاعب دور النشر والمؤلفين، هكذا... نمضي ونحن نطارد فصولاً مفككة ومدمجة معاً في لعبة قص لا تنتهي.

منذ زمن لم اقرأ كتاباً بهذا الجنون، بهذا الكم من المتعة، بهذه القدرة على القبض على شهوتنا الجامحة للقصة، ونشوتنا المفقودة عندما تبتر القصة ولا نحصل على شعور الإشباع ذاك.

يذكر كالفينو في رسالة كتبها لأحد النقاد أن مجموعة من أشهر الروائيين أثروا بشكل أو بآخر بأسلوب كتابة فصول هذه الرواية، وهو ما يصعب علينا كقراء اكتشاف أين كان ذلك التأثر، هذه الأسماء الأيقونية تضم بولغاكوف وتانيزاكي وكاوباتا وخوان رولفو وأرجيداس وبورخيس وتشسترتون.

إنها رواية عملاقة عن القارئ، وعن الكاتب، عن الناشر وعن دور النشر، عن الكتابة كفن والقراءة كمتعة خالصة.

سيفتتح كالفينو الرواية بك أنت، أيها القارئ، سيتحدث عنك، كيف تجلس مرتاحاً لقراءة كتابه (لو أن مسافراً في ليلة شتاء)، هذه القراءة التي ستبدأ برجل غامض في محطة قطار، سرعان ما ستحبط عندما تكتشف أن الكتاب الذي بين يديك وقع ضحية خطأ مطبعي جعل بقية الكتاب تكرار للفصل الأول، هكذا ستذهب للمكتبة لتستبدل الكتاب هناك ستلتقي بفتاة جميلة تدعى لودميلا جاءت تشكو من ذات الشيء، وكلاكما سيقرر أن يحصل على كتاب آخر لمؤلف آخر بعدما تكتشفان أن الكتاب الذي قرأتماه وأعجبكما ليس لكالفينو وليس (لو أن مسافراً في ليلة شتاء)، وإنما هو (خارج بلدة مالبورك) لكاتب بولندي يدعى بازاكبال، هكذا كل كتاب يفضي بطريقة ما لكتاب آخر، إنها رحلة ممتعة مع قاص مذهل، تتركنا في النهاية بحسرة على كل هذه القصص الجميلة التي لن نعرف نهاياتها أبداً.

Not only is this book maybe the ultimate love ballad to readers, but it also may be the premiere text to pin down that obscure yet incomparable experience of reading as pure--sometimes (often) erotic--bliss. Lofty books deserve lofty praise. Keep reading, dear Readers.