Η πρώτη γνωριμία με τον Καλβίνο στέφθηκε από μεγάλη επιτυχία. Γοητεύτηκα. Είναι το πρώτο δικό του βιβλίο που διαβάζω και χωρίς να έχω ιδιαίτερη γνώση της βιβλιογραφίας του, για να γνωρίζω αν πρόκειται για ένα από τα πιο αντιπροσωπευτικά του έργα, βρήκα τούτο δω ένα εξαιρετικά ενδιαφέρον και πρωτότυπο ανάγνωσμα που για να πείσεις τον αναγνώστη να το διαβάσει ως το τέλος σημαίνει ότι γράφεις καλά. Είναι ένα πολύ ιδιαίτερο βιβλίο και δε σας κρύβω ότι και εγώ η ίδια που το ευλογώ αυτή τη στιγμή είχα στιγμές που χάθηκα λίγο στην ανάγνωση όμως ήταν τόσο πραγματικά ενδιαφέρουσα η σύλληψη και εκτέλεση της ιδέας που παρέλειπα τις όποιες απορίες μου και ξαναχανόμουν μέσα στις σελίδες του. Ένα άκρως βιβλιοφιλικό ανάγνωσμα για όλους εμάς που ξοδεύουμε ατελείωτες ώρες μέσα στα βιβλία, ένα βιβλίο που ο ίδιος ο Καλβίνο θα βάλει τον αναγνώστη να γίνει μέρος της πλοκής και να βρει μέσα σε αυτό όλα εκείνα τα στοιχεία που αφορούν ένα βιβλιοφάγο.
Μέσα από δέκα ιστορίες που ο Καλβίνο τις αφήνει χωρίς προφανές τέλος και κόβοντας τες όλες σε κομβικό σημείο ο Καλβίνο δημιουργεί ένα θα έλεγα ιδιαίτερα μοντέρνο για την εποχή που γράφτηκε μην πω και για σήμερα καθώς και ριψοκίνδυνο ανάγνωσμα που θα βρει αρκετούς υποστηρικτές. Ένα εγχείρημα που προσπαθεί να μυήσει τον αναγνώστη στην πολυεπίπεδη ανάγνωση και σίγουρα θα διεγείρει τις αισθήσεις του και θα παίξει με τις ικανότητες αφομοίωσης που έχει ατομικά ως αναγνώστης. Προτείνεται ανεπιφύλακτα μόνο μια συμβουλή χρειάζεται απαιτητικό και ιδιαίτερα προσεκτικό διάβασμα. Αν το ξεκινήσετε με τη λογική απλά να περάσω την ώρα μου διαβάζοντας κάτι το πιο πιθανό είναι ότι θα απογοητευτείτε και θα κουραστείτε και ενδεχομένως να το παρατήσετε.

Writing an entire novel in second person narrative is pretty difficult. In my opinion, something always seems off. Like inauthentic. I may be able to imagine myself as the character the author boldly makes me out to be, but the ability the keep the reader focused, I have found, is quite difficult. The effect can be a lack of empathy for the situations being told. Italo Calvino, in one of his most lauded works in a seemingly universally acclaimed body of work, If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, is able to actually do quite the opposite. Because of, not in spite of, the second person point of view, readers are even more immersed in the story, making the story more relatable, eliciting more empathy, than likely possible in the typical first or third person point of views.

It is undeniable that this book is a work of literary creativity, Calvino utilizing various forms of difficult and therefore not often used story structure, form, framing, and plot. The fourth wall is broken in multiple forms (If On A Winter's Night A Traveler is the name of the first book "you" are trying to read by none other than Italo Calvino. However, in the form of a frame story.

Each chapter is divided into two sections. The first section of each chapter is in second person, and describes the process the reader goes through to attempt to read the next chapter of the book he is reading. The second half is the first part of a new book that the reader ("you") finds. The second half is always about something different from the previous ones and the ending is never explained.

The chapters which are the first chapters of different books all push the narrative chapters along. Themes which are introduced in each of the first chapters will then exist in succeeding narrative chapters, such as after reading the first chapter of a detective novel, then the narrative story takes on a few common detective-style themes. There are also phrases and descriptions which will be eerily similar between the narrative and the new stories.

The second-person narrative passages develop into a fairly cohesive novel that puts its two protagonists on the track of an international book-fraud conspiracy, a mischievous translator, a reclusive novelist, a collapsing publishing house, and several repressive governments.
The art and nature of reading, the why and the hows readers read, is one of my favorite (admittedly among several) themes that can be most valued.

Things I found out and/or learned:

The odd-numbered passages and the final passage are narrated in the second person. That is, they concern events purportedly happening to the novel's reader. (Some contain further discussions about whether the man narrated as "you" is the same as the "you" who is actually reading.) These chapters concern the reader's adventures in reading Italo Calvino's novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Eventually the reader meets a woman named Ludmilla, who is also addressed in her own chapter, separately, and also in the second person.

The ending exposes a hidden element to the entire book, where the actual first-chapter titles (which are the titles of the books that the reader is trying to read) make up a single coherent sentence, which would make a rather interesting start for a book.

The narrative techniques are quite inventive. Impressively so. If not for the fact that it is a well written, fun puzzle-like maze of a good time read- which might be subjective, everyone and anyone should read this book for the objective fact that it is- so many years later- one of, if not the- books that exemplifies native techniques in storytelling. We should all commend this one!

If, on a summer's morning, a teacher ventured to explain why she loved this novel so much, she would probably end up with an incomplete sentence, leading to a tangle of thoughts strongly opposed to being untangled for fear of losing their beautiful chaotic pattern ...

If on a summer's day, a teacher got sidetracked and started explaining the charm of multiple beginnings, comparing them to the loose ends in life stories, she would probably lose her students to dreams, and they would drift and tangle their own stories in minds full of other things ...

If on a summer's evening, a teacher started reading the beloved book again, she would probably discover that it had changed since she last touched it, and that both writer and reader now seemed to be different persons, even though they are still a perfect match, and she would travel across new and wellknown territory into the wide open storytelling ocean ...

If on a summer's night, a teacher dreamed of a perfect story, it would contain several stories hidden in each other and they would be both a love story and a theory and a magic wand opening doors to the world and to the mind in a way that only travellers of Calvino's calibre manage, and she would smile in her dream and start a new story, and it would never end ...

شاید وقتی عنوان این کتاب رو جایی یا اصلا همین‌جا دیده یا شنیده باشید با خودتون فکر کنید که چه خوب! یه داستان نرم و صمیمی و خوش‌خوان که برای شب‌های زمستونی کاملا مناسبه و حسابی قراره گرمم کنه. لازمه بهتون بگم در این صورت کاملا در اشتباه خواهید بود. چرا؟ در ادامه پاسخ این سوال رو بهتون خواهم گفت.

قبل از این کتاب، من سری سه‌گانه‌ی نیاکان ما از کالوینو رو خونده بودم و فکر می‌کردم قراره با کتابی مشابه اون‌ها مواجه بشم. سیر داستانی مشخص و خطی با چاشنی طنز کالوینویی چیزی بود که ازش انتظار داشتم. ولی اصلا و ابدا این‌طور نبود. به محض اینکه کتاب رو شروع کردم و جملات ابتدایی کتاب رو خوندم به یه سطح دیگه‌ای برخورد کردم:

تو داری شروع به خواندن داستان جدید ایتالو کالوینو، اگر شبی از شب‌های زمستان مسافری، می‌کنی. آرام بگیر، حواست را جمع کن. تمام افکار دیگر را از سر دور کن. بگذار دنیایی که تو را احاطه کرده در پس ابر نهان شود. از آن سو تلویزیون مثل همیشه روشن است، پس بهتر است در را ببندی. فوراً به همه بگو: «نه نمی‌خواهم تلویزیون تماشا کنم.» اگر صدایت را نمی‌شنوند بلندتر بگو: «دارم کتاب می‌خوانم. نمی‌خواهم کسی مزاحم شود.»

همین پاراگراف‌های ابتدایی فصل اول کتاب باعث شد در ابتدا به این کتاب به دید خاص نگاه کنم و به این نتیجه برسم که با یه کتاب متفاوت طرفم.


کتاب از دو قسمت مجزای بینابینی تشکیل شده:
۱- داستان خود ما به عنوان خواننده‌ی کتاب و اتفاقاتی که قراره برامون بیفته و ما رو درگیر خواندن کتاب‌ها و تجربه‌های کتابی بکنه.
۲- داستان‌های متفاوت و جذاب و البته ناتمامی که خود آقای کالوینو بین این فصل‌ها برامون گنجونده و هر کدومش دنیایی از عجایب و رمز و رازه.


شاید در مرحله‌ی اول و بعد از خوندن دو-سه فصل فکر کنید با کتابی مواجه اید که ارتباط گرفتن باهاش سخته و قراره در طول داستان دلزده‌تون کنه ولی اگر حوصله کنید و تن به این سفر هیجان‌انگیز بدید مطمئنم در پایان کتاب غافلگیر خواهید شد. چیزی که نیازمند خواندن کتابه صبر و حوصله و فرصت دادن به حرف‌های آقای کالوینوعه تا بتونه خودش رو اثبات کنه. گرچه از همون ابتدای کار، کالوینو راه خودش رو مشخص کرده و مخاطب‌ها رو مجذوب کارش می‌کنه. در فصل اول چنان ژرف و عمیق در لحظات کتابی خواننده و تجربیات اون نفوذ می‌کنه که کلماتی بهتر از خود سخنان آقای کالوینو اون رو توصیف نمی‌کنن:

کتاب را در دستت می‌چرخانی، نوشته‌های پشت جلد و برگردان آن را نگاه می‌کنی، همان جملات همیشگی که حرف مهمی ندارند.[..] البته این نوع چرخش به دور کتاب، یعنی دور و بر آن را خواندن، پیش از خواندن داخل آن، خودش بخشی از لذت بردن از یک کتاب است.

یک کتاب تازه منتشر شده، به تو نوعی لذت خاص می‌دهد. این فقط کتاب نیست که داری با خود می‌بری بلکه تازگی آن است[..] شاید آن‌ را برای لحظه‌ای در کتاب‌فروشی ورق زده باشی یا شاید در لفاف زرورق پیچیده شده بود و موفق به این کار نشدی؟ در اتوبوس هستی، میان باقی ایستاده‌ای، دستگیره را با یک دست گرفته‌ای، درحالی که سعی داری بسته‌ی کتاب را باز کنی.[...] شاید کتاب‌فروش، کتاب را نپیچیده و آن را توی کیسه‌ای به تو داده. همین، کارها را آسان‌تر می‌کند.

با این حال علاوه بر زیبایی‌هایی که در ابتدا می‌بینیم، قلم کالوینو در اکثر نقاط کتاب به‌ویژه در بخش‌های مربوط به قسمت اول تاحدودی سخت‌خوان می‌شه. اصطلاحات علمی، پیچیدگی‌های فلسفی هرچند جزئی، شخصیت‌های زیادی که حتی با هم همپوشانی هم پیدا می‌کنن، فرم روایی پیچید‌ه‌‌ای که نیازمند دقته و همینطور دنیای تخیلی مرموزش از جمله عواملی هستن که کتاب رو از حالت راحت‌خوان درمیارن و بعضا تمام تصورات قبلیتون تا اون قسمت کتاب رو به هم می‌ریزن. اگه در این مرحله قرار گرفتین باید با به صفحات قبلی سری بزنید و با عزم راسخ و استوار قسمت‌هایی که متوجه منظور آقای کالوینو نبودید رو دوباره‌خوانی کنین! باشد که هشدار داده باشیم! ولی نگران نباشید! آقای کالوینو فکر این رو هم کرده و از متفاوت بودن اثرش خبر داره و همه‌ی مومنین و مومنات رو به صبر و تقوا دعوت می‌کنه:

نویسنده همیشه از این کتاب تا آن کتاب کلی تغییر پیدا می‌کند و دقیقا به همین دلیل است که او را می‌شناسند. اما واقعا به‌نظر می‌رسد که این کتاب هیچ ارتباطی با باقی کارهایش ندارد. حداقل تا آن‌جایی که تو یادت است.
ناامید شدی؟ صبر کن. طبیعی است که در ابتدا کمی سردرگم شوی.

دومین قسمت کتاب همونطور که گفتم داستان‌های ناتمومی هستن که فوق العاده جذاب و خواندنی اند. هرکدوم از این داستان‌ها انقدر قوی اند که قابلیت بردن جایزه‌ی من‌بوکر و پولیتزر و استرگا و گنکور و چی و چی و غیره رو دارند. این داستان‌ها با سیر داستانی اول ارتباط خاصی برقرار می‌کنن. در واقع بعضی از عناصری که در این داستان‌ها هستن در فصل های پیشین و پسین داستان به نحوی وجود دارن و تکرار می‌شن. حلقه‌ی زنجیر و اتصالی هستن که این داستان‌های عجیب رو به دنیای ادبی خواننده در اون فصل‌ها پیوند می‌ده و همین امر به همبستگی و انسجام دو بخش اصلی کتاب دلالت داره.

سوای همه‌ی این‌ها نکته‌ی اصلی‌ای که درمورد این کتاب وجود داره اینه که کتاب در باب اهمیت کتاب‌خوانیه. در خود نفس کتاب‌خوندن. در تجربه‌های کتابی یا به قول آقای اخوت "خاطرات کتابی". کالوینو با روایت‌های داستانی‌اش سعی ‌می‌کنه تجربه‌ی کتاب‌خوندن ما رو با جهان ادبیات گره بزنه. با خود نویسنده گره بزنه. با افرادی که در حال حاضر مثل ما دارن این کتاب رو می‌خونن و یا حتی افرادی که به طور کلی ذره‌ای به این دنیای نامتناهی ادبیات علاقه‌ی ژرف و تحسین‌برانگیزی در هر گوشه‌ی جهان دارن. کتاب و ادبیات برای آقای کالوینو صرفا یک ارتباط یک‌طرفه از سمت نویسنده به سمت خواننده نیست بلکه ارتباط چندسویه‌ است.

Jedna od originalnijih knjiga pročitanih ove godine čiji se pripovedački stil, smisao za humor i visprenost autora odlikuju upečatljivošću. Potiče želju da se uskoro zađe u svetove još jednog Kalvinovog naslova. Zanimljiv je i koncept samog romana, čije su stranice pune hipnotičnih misli o knjigama, njihovom značenju i koristi koje imaju u savremenom društvu.

4+

این کتاب رو از کتابخونه گرفتم. بعد از خوندنش یه برگه از دفترچه‌ام کندم و روش نوشتم: «حتی اگر به امانت گرفته نشود، این کتاب همیشه در دست مطالعه‌ست. از طرف یک خواننده.»
برگه رو لای کتاب گذاشتم.

Why do you read?
Maybe you want to impress somebody. Libraries are cool, or so they say.
Or you expect to learn something from the books you so carefully select.
Or you merely have a preference for intellectual entertainment and books are considered a smart option to fulfill that purpose.
Or maybe you read to remember all the lives you haven't lived, or that important person who left a permanent track on you, whom you don’t expect to see again, or to delight again in the innocent thrill of being told a story like in your childhood days.

Maybe you read to find yourself.
Or your former selves.
Or the shadows of the younger, or projected older versions of yourself.
Or to fill that gnawing void that is tearing you apart.
Perhaps you read to escape the grey hues of your mundane reality.
The constant nagging of useless typing that reverberates all day long at the office.
The futile bureaucracy of preordained jobs that keep you glued to a screen, dying slowly in front of a computer, or behind a counter, or in an assembly line, or behind a wheel, or listening to nonsense of all sorts.
Maybe you read to defy the large-scale absurdity of a world that has lost its humanity. To shout out in silence. To resist the general predisposition for resigned acceptance without questioning the results of your actions.

Whatever the reason, burying your nose in a book works like magic because once you have turned the front cover, an exquisite crawl of small inked letters absorbs all your attention while the prosaic surroundings that oppress you vanish in the blink of an eye. Gone are the obligations! The responsibilities! The sacrifices! Your failures. Past, Present and Future. Only the book and you exist. A sophisticated game for two. A unique chance to start from scratch and get that ending that you didn't manage to secure in your real life.
Wait… Or is it a new beginning that you are seeking?

Calvino is a masterful teaser. Rather than displaying his artistry through a sophisticated or overly ornamented narrative style, he turns the focus on the Reader, who becomes the true protagonist of this contemporary novel(s), where the experience of reading mirrors the act of writing. Opening a book generates expectation of the purest kind. Everything is possible because nothing has happened yet. Beginnings imply sheer rapture, for they carry the promises, or even better, the yearnings that make hearts beat and pulses accelerate with anticipation. Beginnings carry that wistful aura that hovers around a closed book or a first date, before they lose that original gloss.
And so what could be better than a book composed of only beginnings?
The best stories are the ones not yet written, the ones that hold all the potentiality of infinite untrodden paths, countless possible endings.

Calvino is a brilliant writer, but he is also an observant, a meticulous thief, who has mused long and deep upon the elusive facets of literature. He addresses the Reader in second-person narrator and gets infiltrated in his mind, stealing his intimate mental pictures to construct his stillborn stories, ruthlessly tantalizing him until the agonizing cacophony of fake characters, secret conspiracies, carefully chosen settings and irresistible femme fatales provide a tapestry of elegant thematic patterns that sing the most symphonious hymn to books and to the art of reading I have ever encountered.

Why do I read?
To see captured in written words what is inexpressible.
The true essence of what it means to Love Literature.
To live forever and to die every time the last page of a novel you don't want to end is inevitably turned.

You are now reading a review by Sidharth Vardhan of book ‘If on a Winter Night a traveler’ by Italo Calvino. You had started your computer (or perhaps you are using your computer, logged into your Goodreads account and were checking your dashboard when this review pop up. ‘Another parody review!’ you thought after reading the first line, ‘as if this book hadn’t enough of them’. But perhaps you found it on your mobile. You opened it in new tab and start reading it or may have bookmarked it, so that you can read it in a more convenient time.

Is ‘now’ the convenient time? Are you at your office, supposed to be working? You may want to keep looking over your screen in case your boss shows up. Remember you can’t afford to lose your job, there are all those books you still have to buy.

Or perhaps you are having a break from your reading. Or having a meal – in which case, it is okay. There are things more important than books - but you know that food is not one of them.

Or you might not be alone – you might be with your better or worse half, as case may be. In that case, if you are a guy; it is prudent to stop reading this review. But if you are a woman, it is okay all you got to do is put that lose hair behind your ear. Yes, just like that. Smooth. But, wait, you don’t want to smile too much or your partner might be jealous.

Now, if you have already read the book, you no longer trust the title since it has betrayed you once – you can’t be too sure with all those fake books going around these days. And yes, it is ‘If on a Winter Night’s a traveler’ - not ‘Without fear of wind’ or ‘Vertigo’ or ‘Leaning from the steep slope’ or ‘Outside the town of Malbork’ or ‘In a network of lines that enlace’ or ‘Looks down the gathering shadow’ or ‘In a network of lines that intersect’ or ‘On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon’ or ‘Around an empty grave’ or ‘What story down there awaits its end?’ or any other books.

Next you checked the rating the reviewer gave to the book – something which is of special importance if the book in case is a favorite for you. Because, admit it, you feel a kind of possessiveness for your favorite books – as if you own them, wrote them. You want them to do well, them to be liked by all - almost as if they were you children. And if someone doesn’t like them, you feel a bit hurt; sometimes you even think that this someone is still immature to realize the full value of the great work. However, in this case, five stars, so that is not a problem here.

Next, you scrolled down the screen to check whether the review is too long. Too long it is. Yet, you decided to go through it – that is because you haven’t read it and want to know about the book. Or you have already read it – but want to know what I have to say. Not that my opinion is that important – what am I to you but a vague person in some vague part of the world made real only by these reviews? No, rather you think of books you read as if they were places you go to and of reviews as snapshots from there – and therefore, when you see a review from someone else of a book you have already read; it is not her/his opinion that is more relevant but rather you want to check through these snaps - whether those places still look, smell, taste the same, excite the same emotions as they once did in you.

The title of this book, for example, reminds you of the frustration brought by the beginnings of novels that went nowhere; of being made to smile at an almost Nabokovian naughtiness, of being awed by Borges-ian cleverness in playing with realities, of being forced to walk in shoes of a ‘you’ that weren’t you – initially you may have felt used, may be a bit insulted at being reduced to a mere character, a puppet in author’s hands but then you started enjoying being that ‘you’ … and also don’t you remember how when being that ‘you’, you found your and 'your' soul-mate in a book shop? ‘As if there could be a better place’ you murmur.

And yet, so far nothing worth your while has been mentioned in this review; you are feeling a bit disappointed. ‘Very disappointed’ you correct me. And it becomes necessary that I, as the reviewer, should ensure you that I’ve happened to come across some previously undisclosed information about the author – some gossip you might say … but you prefer the word ‘trivia’, well, as you like it, some trivia which shall entirely change or, if I may be so bold to say, enhance your reading experience. And in case, you still doubt it – I give my word of honor that I’m going to share such a trivia. Now you feel some confidence in your decision to pursue this review, right?

You may feel like throwing at me a romantic idea you believe in, like ‘the author is merely incidental, and it is only the work you are interested in’. But still the fact is you are at least a little curious – you can’t help it, you are a Goodreader; the kind of person who can’t help opening a book he/she saw; steals a book you can’t own, who feels as poor in a bookshop as in company of your crush – and who will stare greedily and almost sensously run your lustful finger on books in shops even when knowing you have no intention of buying them (there are no pleasures like stolen pleasures, right?) Yes, you are curious – no matter what you say. In any case, just stop picking up your nose.

… And also as you remember sometimes, I do sometimes have something really good to say (Oh! Come on people, it won’t kill you to nod on that) which i always say in a no-nonsense fashion without beating around the bush, the idea just won't occur to me - it is just not my nature to keep dragging the subject, I will just come out and say it. And I am .... that .... that thing, what you call it, the word you use for someone really good with words .... eloquent, yes, thank you, I'm eloquent ..... or you remember my God-fearing good nature … or at least I am good at spotting the quotes which, I am always careful to provide double-quoted, italicized and blockquoted in my review like this:

n   “Okay I’ve got nothing this time.” n

In fact,  I have planned an excellent ending which shall mock Shakespeare’s Hamlet and go like this:
“The rest is a spoiler.
Okay, I have really got nothing."

Now you are laughing (if you are enjoying the review, do tell by commenting - adjectives like 'fabulous', 'fantastic and 'incredible' are recommended) … or, may be, today you are not in a mode of jest – it is not one of your best days, may be you were already angry at one of Goodreads’ habitual technical glitches and are further frustrated at childishness of this review; moreover you are one of those who can not be tricked with those jokes, you are too clever for them - even now you have quickly realised that I'm trying to flatter you to make you forget your anger and like me more. If that is the case, you are yourself to blame – I’ve Bart Simpson on my profile picture, remember!

By now, you might be considering whether or not to stop reading this review, but the fact that you have come so far and are thus invested, or the temptation of knowing that trivia I promised, is stopping you from doing it. In which case, you want me to stop second guessing your reactions and get on with …

Okay, I hear you, you don't have to yell. No more jokes. *smiles sinister-ly* You see, the thing is there already exists an incredible review here and I’m feeling a bit sleepy. But not any longer. Let me just give the information. It is ….
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Oops.I felt asleep. Apologies. I see my link too went nowhere. Apologies again. It is all that sleepiness you know. Anyways, I won’t keep you much longer. It is already the last paragraph and I can feel your frustration coming out of the screen. And so to keep my promise, I will just dispense with that vital information before I feel asleep again. The time has come, readjust your specs, move closer to screen, pay attention, here it is: The author of the postmodernist novel ‘If on a Winter Night’s a traveler’( which was published in 1979); an Italian journalist and writer of novels and short stories – and also a major contender of Nobel Prize during his life time; Italo Calvina was …
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You are about to read the review of On a Winter's Night A Traveller by Jonathan Terrington. You look at the review but it is not what you expect. You then think some deep thoughts about the world, are constantly addressed as You and wonder what on earth just happened....

This is the response I had to If On a Winter's Night A Traveller which is perhaps one of the most bizarre books I have read. I don't know if it was actually as smart as it seemed to think it was but I liked it still despite many aspects of the book that just seemed like the author's way of putting himself up on a pedestal and yelling "LOOK HOW GREAT I AM!" Anyway I liked this book, reader.

If On a Winter's Night A Traveller is very metafictional and metaphorical. Which is probably why I liked it. I love a book that references other books even if those books and tales are created within the book I was reading. Which is what happens here with this book. The story follows You, the reader, as You meet the Other Reader and pursue her across various novels you read (and which seem to have a female character reminiscent of her). This all works from a male reader's perspective but I did have to wonder what female readers would think being placed into a masculine point of view. That said it was a unique read and somewhat entertaining to me.

If on a winter's night a traveller
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?

By now reader you shall have reached the end. You will likely either ignore the review or push the 'like' button. Perhaps you will leave a comment or two for the reviewer. Perhaps you will simply like the review. And perhaps if the reviewer is fortunate you will like the review enough to give the book a chance. Then when you read If On a Winter's Night A Traveller other readers will ask what you are reading and you will say If On a Winter's Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino.

I like books to be about other things, not just about books. So even when I got past the obstacle of the first chapter there was still a lot to roll my eyes at. (That chapter, on perhaps my second attempt at If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, 5 1/2 years ago, had annoyed me so much that I ostentatiously threw the book down on the patio.) A lot of stuff in this novel sounds like overthinking even to me. And about something so trivial and boringly recursive. I just do not *get* "book culture" as described in this wonderfully damning essay about twee book merchandise, the outcry against Kondo-ing books, and other current consumerist manifestations. Playful/cosy books about books also belong in that category as far as I'm concerned. But, like Lotaria in If on a Winter's Night, I love cultural/socio-political etc etc analyses of these things.

In 2014, I thought the first chapter, addressed to "you" the reader, sounded invasively intimate, presuming how the reader feels, talking about their posture etc. (Very different from the 'you' of the outward-looking political novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, which I read and loved the year before.) In November and December 2019, I read Richardson's Pamela, and also realised how unpleasant I'd have found it when I was younger. If I could read Pamela now with such detachment as to find it a page-turner, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller was hardly likely to be a problem. And so it was. There are a lot of books which read no differently to me now than they did many years ago - but this was one of the handful of exceptions. (The others are mostly when, in my teens and early twenties, it seemed as if they were saying, people find this bad behaviour cool and interesting and you will be more successful and liked if you emulate it. Though a few actually *were* saying that, like parts of Bitch by Elizabeth Wurtzel.) In January 2020, with the first chapter of If on a Winter's Night, I was, like, yeah, generic cold reading attempt, mixed with the author's own experiences put in second person … *shrug*

There is some serious craft in this novel from author and translator, on a sentence level, and on the chapter level of pastiching numerous styles (hence 3 stars), but unlike so many GR friends who love this book, I couldn't care about its main characters any more than about figures on a cuckoo clock, or clockwork toys. The whole spectacle was like bits of TV programmes glimpsed while channel-hopping, easy to detach even from those which might be of passing interest.

Not long before I started If on a Winter's Night this time, I'd actually got a book with printing errors - a rare experience I hadn't had for at least 15 years - and the replacement copy even had the same errors; yet this didn't make me bond any further with If on a Winter's Night and its' protagonists' frantic need to get the rest of each book. The book was refunded, but I didn't honestly have time to read it soon anyway, and there will be other, properly printed copies around if and when it makes sense for me to get another. For me to be even half as bothered as Calvino's protagonists are about getting the next instalment, it would have to be a TV series I'd already seen part of, was using as comfort viewing at a bad time, I'd just prepared food to eat while watching it, and I wasn't feeling up to doing much else, so wouldn't be glad about having the unexpected extra hour.

And as for the analogy in the frame narrative of If on a Winter's Night, I just find it silly to look at reading books as similar to pulling. The premise reminds me of the Swiss Toni sketches from 90s comedy series The Fast Show, in which an oleaginous car salesman compared almost any activity to "making love to a beautiful woman". (And in a novel by an Italian man, it also invites a bunch of stereotypes about Italian men…) Though alongside "bookish" tweeness, and the shyness of the male protagonist, this preoccupation suggests 00s films like 500 Days of Summer and Garden State.

The intimations of 1970s culture were more interesting - and unexpected in a novel which is usually talked about (at least on GR and blogs) as if it were timeless. It's only towards the end of the 2010s that there is enough distance from the sexual revolution of the 1960s-70s (at least for some of us who'd been reading these books since our teens) to see how it suffused literary novels for several decades with sexual subplots where men pursued women - far more explicit than those in pre-WWII literature, and rarely containing the critical examination of these relationships that became more common during the last decade. The frame narrative, and several of the adumbrated books-within-the-book, are suffused with men's desire for women.

Paranoia is the mood of a number of 1970s films, especially from the New Hollywood movement, but I've noticed it considerably less often in 1970s literary fiction. It's here, though, in the many conspiracy theories that build up around why the protagonists can't get the books they want, the absurd and Byzantine organisation that may seek to stop them, or to complicate readers' and authors' lives; in impromptu journeys to fictional Cold War regimes, and some of the fictional books-in-the-book. (I find the sense of importance this creates essentially ludicrous, and would unless it were seriously about a repressive regime that was restricting citizens' reading. It never felt convincingly as if it were, it's just a game or conceit like Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series. I didn't like that very much either, but in retrospect, the lead characters were more appealing.)

I've mostly been responding to opinions of If on a Winter's Night I've seen on Goodreads over the years, from people who have affection for it and long to read the rest of the 'books' in it themselves. But I suspect in that I'm neglecting other meanings of the novel and how neatly they must fit academic fashions of the day about the role of author and reader. There is a lot to say here about the slipperiness of what texts are and how they change according to their perceived provenance. Calvino references what must have been humanities buzzwords of their day:
there must be some who underline the reflections of production methods, others the processes of reification, others the sublimation of repression, others the sexual semantic codes, others the metalanguages of the body, others the transgression of roles, in politics and in private life.
… and trends in the late 1970s counterculture: The corridors of the publishing house are full of snares: drama cooperatives from psychiatric hospitals roam through them, groups devoted to group analysis, feminist commandos…
this is the moment (in the history of Western culture) when self-realization on paper is sought not so much by isolated individuals as by collectives: study seminars, working parties, research teams, as if intellectual labour were too dismaying to be faced alone.
It was similar in The History Man. Then came the individualist 1980s - perhaps why now, a similar parodic list would be of individual activists.

Calvino sometimes seems ahead of his time.
We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.
Now, one might imagine the 1970s within that pre-explosion phase, because it was well before the web, and especially smartphones and social media. (I suspect that he meant before WWII and especially before the discovery of the Nazi concentration camps altered many intellectuals' view of religion and human morality.)
This, about the transmission of a book, may as well be about the internet:
through the telephone wires, let it be reduced to electronic impulses, into flow of information, shaken by redundancies and noises, and let it be degraded into a swirling entropy.
(Though elsewhere, the idea of a clear boundary between 'reader' and 'writer' is so analogue it's bizarre. However, the wish of one character not to transgress that does, perhaps parallel a wish not to post on social media because that might mean getting caught in crossfire.)
Lotaria's analysis of word frequency in novels is meant to parody the un-readingness of academic forms of reading (in contrast to Ludmilla who enjoys the plot, as the compliant and sincere reader is apparently supposed to). But jump forward forty years and digital humanities analyses of large corpuses of texts can use word frequency in a far more sophisticated manner to research prejudice (including sexism) and political tendencies in novels over decades.

Some of the 'opening chapters' were intriguing, but I can't imagine longing to finish these books because they are all obviously pastiches - though a few made me want to read similar, but sincere and authentic novels (there are some buzzwords) by authors actually from the places they are set. Okay, #ownvoices to complete the set, if you can use that term of a bunch of deceased 20th century male authors from Central & Eastern Europe, and Japan.

Outside the town of Malbork, set on a farm in what's evidently a fictional Baltic state, on one level drew me in - and has some similarities with Estonian Anton Tammsaare's Truth & Justice. (Listicle idea: "if you liked this read this" real books for each opening chapter. This is the only one for which I have a good suggestion.) I am very into this kind of old rural farmhouse kitchen setting so it's difficult to put me off with parody of that. However, because of my own background, and a sensibility partly shaped by 21st century identity politics, a) saying the author was Polish and b) the obviously fictional and sometimes silly cod-Baltic names seemed a little insulting from a West European author when these countries have so often been seen as an indistinct mass in the West.

Leaning from the Steep Slope was another favourite in so far as I had any. It was intriguing how it seemed to conjure an early 20th century setting from almost nothing: why was I imagining the characters in the outfits I did when there was so little description to be sure of the era until nearer the end. A weather station was an intriguing and original setting, and the Baltic States seaside is a place I'd love to read more about. Repressive regimes existed pre-WWI in Central/Eastern Europe but one has to go out of one's way to read fiction set in them when it's not about Russia. It felt very much as if Calvino was taking the piss out of Eastern European stories of depressive young existentialist men living under dictatorships, at a time when Soviet communism was still squashing millions of people. I'm sure people who didn't have any family connections to the Eastern Bloc sometimes got sick of this stuff, and TBH I've not heard a lot mocking it, because I was too young to understand much beyond asking questions like "Why do all the Russian presidents keep dying?" (When, in the first half of the 80s they were not yet called Russian or president officially). So it's kind of instructive to see an example, but at the same time it annoys me. There may be a touch of deliberate naïvety about the narrator, as in Mark Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, but he has such elaborate insight into his own philosophical mental states (which I for one liked, though the framing characters find him solipsistic), and so little into others' behaviours which, in a dictatorship, people would have trained themselves to notice as a matter of survival, that it doesn't hang together as anything other than satire.

Without fear of wind or vertigo presents an intriguing prompt for a historical novel - I think it would have to be historical because the scenario was so rare in fiction from the time it was set. In an unspecified Central/East European city where revolution, war or probably both are breaking out, an intense ménage a trois develops between two young men and a dominant and intellectual young woman, each with a somewhat different political agenda and role in the conflict. It reminded me a little of the Bertolucci film The Dreamers, but with characters with clearer senses of purpose. And the femdom element seemed so strikingly unusual because was there anything else like that in literature of that region but Sacher-Masoch himself, even fifty years after his time?

I was less interested in the thriller chapters, though In a network of lines that enlace had an atmosphere of 70s paranoia that, rightly or wrongly, reminded me of Marathon Man. And In a network of lines that intersect, in which a bestselling thriller writer, tired of his usual material, tries to write a deeply literary memoir, had amusing synchronicity with discussion threads about Lee Child as a Booker Prize judge. (Those were a good reminder of just *how* unlikely this 'book' really would be.)

On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon, in its early pages, contained the most beautiful sentences in the book and evoked the contemplative zen-like states its genuine counterparts would seek to. However, it is also very stereotypical about Japan: what else interrupts the contemplation of leaves in the ornamental garden but … weird sex. There is master and disciple, conflicts between different masters, women who appear subordinate but rebel quietly, flower arranging, waterlilies, sukiyaki (which, having seen it in other 60s/70s books, I think was fashionable in the West), names echoing Japanese classics (Makiko), you name it…

I've hardly seen any Mexican westerns but even then, Around an empty grave seems a *very* shallow pastiche. He actually called a character Nacho??

The stories as to why the rest of each book is unavailable, and why the characters are presented with yet another, become ever more absurd and convoluted. Presumably fun if you're into it; I just found it tedious. It didn't even have the decency to be proper farce, with propulsive capering energy, just ever more recursive about novels and reading. And damningly, only a month after I finished the book, I'd retained no sense of whether the protagonists got together in the end. (I just looked - actually almost any result would have prompted "urgh, twee" because either one or the other could appear a stock ending.) But this book wasn't written to please the Lotarias of this world.

(Read Jan 2020, reviewed Feb 2020)

E vorba, firește, de o carte-manual. Există o figură, un procedeu numite de retoricieni „apostrofa / interpelarea cititorului”. Figura a primit diferite forme la prozatorii vechi și noi: Sterne, Fielding, Balzac, John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth etc. Ofer cîteva exemple formulate de mine ad hoc, pentru a vă face o idee:

- „Și acum, dragă cititorule, te voi lăsa să-ți închipui singur ce s-a întîmplat între cei doi tineri inocenți. Eu voi trage ușa după mine și îmi voi acoperi pudic ochii și urechile...”;

- „Cititor josnic și pervers, cum de ți-ai putut imagina că Eliza, blînda Elisa, sărmana Eliza, l-a putut trăda pe nobilul Josh? Mi-e rușine de tine. Numai la prostii îți stă mintea...”;

- „Cititor tîmpit, nu ești în stare să pricepi nimic din ce-ți spun aici. Ai o minte de găină...”;

- „Cititorule, ai observat deja cu siguranță cît de subtil sînt. Am știut io pe cine să mă bazez...”...

Interpelarea (frecventă odinioară) a ieșit din modă. Azi este folosită destul de rar și mai cu seamă ironic & parodic, în scop de amuzament reciproc. Italo Calvino a avut ideea să construiască un întreg roman folosind acest procedeu retoric. A rezultat ceea ce avem în față. Nu cred că există foarte mulți cititori care au simțit vreo plăcere ascuțită străbătînd cele 10 începuturi de roman. De distrat s-au distat, nu spun nu. Dar plăcerea rămîne una pur intelectuală. Cartea se cuvine citită (este o lectură obligatorie, de altfel) pentru ingeniozitatea diabolică a autorului.

Calvino spune limpede în textul introductiv: În acest roman, am dus la extrem ceea ce a inaugurat Edgar Allan Poe (în Corbul plus Filosofia compoziției) și a ilustrat Jorge Luis Borges în unele dintre povestirile sale (Apropierea de Almotasim). Scrisul nu mai este o demiurgie frenetică, un efect al inspirației, o țîșnire, un dar al Muzelor divine. A devenit o „ars combinatoria”, o activitate lucidă, un calcul meticulos.

Compoziția lui Italo Cavino e discutată îndeosebi la cursurile de naratologie și este privită mai degrabă ca un eseu decît ca o ficțiune propriu-zisă. Notorietatea ei printre studenți și „specialiști” este imensă. Cînd s-a redescoperit rolul fundamental al cititorului în „realizarea” textului (în anii 70 ai secolului trecut), scrierea unui astfel de roman a devenit inevitabilă.

Cine nu zîmbește cînd parcurge un pasaj precum cel transcris mai jos de mine? Să ne amuzăm:

„[Și acum, cititorule] alege-ţi poziţia cea mai comodă: aşezat, întins, ghemuit, culcat. Culcat pe spate, pe o parte, pe burtă. În fotoliu, pe canapea, pe balansoar, pe şezlong, pe taburet, în hamac, dacă ai un hamac. Pe pat, fireşte, sau în pat. Poţi să stai şi cu capul în jos, în poziţie yoga. Cu cartea întoarsă, bineînţeles. Sigur, nu există o poziţie ideală pentru citit...

Bine, ce mai aştepţi? întinde picioarele, pune-le, dacă vrei, pe o pernă, pe două perne, pe braţele divanului, ale fotoliului, pe o măsuţă, pe birou, pe pian, pe globul pămîntesc. Scoate-ţi pantofii mai întîi. Asta, dacă vrei să ţii picioarele ridicate; dacă nu, pune-i la loc. Şi acum nu sta acolo, cu pantofii într-o mînă şi cu cartea în cealaltă...”.

Chiar așa: Nu uita, frate cititor, de pantofi!

I have not finished the book but it does not matter. I can post my review already.

You are wondering whether to phone the police to remove Mark Nicholls from your house. You are deeply confused as to why this reviewer whose opinions you find facile and banal is suddenly sitting naked on your couch reading the very book you were reading about,” he says. You look for a blunt instrument to hit him with, but can find only a cup. You throw the cup, but he ducks and it breaks against the wall. Then Garima tells Mark: well, I am not here to review this book but since that’s the only option available here so I can’t help it. I have nothing new or different to say that hasn’t been said earlier and neither am I one of those seasoned reviewers on GR that other members look forward to read their views on a particular book (OK! Enough of self-pity).

Of course Geoff Wilt has an opinion. He thinks that This is a fun interactive novel where the reader is prepared by the words, intelligence and a lot of temptations, and Italo Calvino, the central image in the book - Triumphal Entry of art, the writers might have to deal with major changes in our global communications.

Oh, I forgot to mention that in your nightmare, you will be a man!, Fionnuala replies. But Declan retorts: If the book was created by pages torn from the grand narrative, then they were fortuitously chosen because they form one the the most enjoyable and amusing novels you could hope to read, a maze of narratives (none of which ever get close to the exit) whose main subject is the experience of reading a novel about how someone might go about writing a novel about the experience of reading a novel about....etc.

Geoff Wilt has something to add to what he said earlier: This is a novel of interesting interactions where the reader is prepared by the words intelligent, and so many temptations, and Italo Calvino, the central image in the book Triumphal Entry of the art, writers can have to deal with major changes in our global communications. And in this he agrees with Kris, who is ready to quote: “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 area dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.”

Don’t forget Paul’s piece of advice, when he warned us that 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.


Thank god we have a clarification from David Mitchell himself. He believes that The element of humor will often tumesce—which is a lovely word—it will often tumesce and form this nodule that we call a joke, and here we are, it's a funny story. You can find humor in funerals, you can find humor, God help us, in divorces, you can find it in the worst stuff that happens to us. Of course all languages have equivalents for gallows humor, black humor. Yeah, sure,Marilynne Robinson writes serious books, it would be like bread that didn't contain water, it would be stale and unswallowable. She may not be known for her hilarious anecdotes, but there's a lightness and a levity—a humor there. And of course in this he coincides with Geoff Wilt, It is interesting interactive novel where the reader with many cases understanding words, and Italo Calvino, the triumph of art with a picture book entry is made, the authors deal with significant changes in our global communications to be.

Luckily for Jan- Maat Landlubber he has been quick to tell us: This is one of my favourite books. Comfort reading. Fairly sure that I bought this in the early to mid 1990s in Webberleys bookshop in Stoke-on-Trent. It was an old fashioned shop with dark wooden bookshelves that where too close together so that it was difficult to get round, you had to pick your way and wind about to get to the books you wanted to look at. Great place.

But Kalliope would like to summarize all viewpoints.

“ ; . ¿ , ?. : , , , , .” . “ ;

“ ; . ! , , , , . “ : ? , ? , , ? !!!!!”


Only Italo Calvino himself can clarify: Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore; راگر شبی از شبهای زمستان مسافر Si par une nuit d’hiver un voyageur; If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler; Wenn ein Reisender in einer Winternacht; Ако пътник в зимна нощ; Si una noche de invierno un viajero; Dacă într-o noapte de iarnă un călător; Αν μια νύχτα του χειμώνα ένας ταξιδιώτης.