“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 …”

Let me just say, not all writing ideas are good.

I can just picture my mother (who was an avid reader and extremely charitable) holding this book in her hand, scrunching up her face as she reads, then putting the book down into her lap, shrugging her shoulders and saying “I guess some people like this sort of thing.”

I know they do because I read this with a lovely group and many there did like it and discovered interesting and amusing ideas. I enjoyed hearing their thoughts.

But I did not enjoy this book. The beginning was good--a reader beginning a book, with lots of little details we readers can relate to, and then the beginning of a story in a train station that had potential. After that it went downhill fast for me. I wouldn’t have minded the structure: a second person commentary followed by the beginning of a story, repeated and repeated and repeated. What got me was that each round got more and more boring, to the point where I had to force myself to turn the pages.

Calvino writes “…all the stories I read seem to carry an echo, immediately lost.” Perhaps. But in this book I not only lost the echo, I lost the story. I was shocked at how quickly I forgot each chapter after finishing it. I mean it was wiped completely out of my mind, which was very frustrating because of the work I had to put into paying attention to it enough to keep reading.

This is a post-modernist experiment, not a story. The author is clearly capable of writing a good story, and teases his readers, particularly the bookish kind, with thoughts about the experience of reading and the constraints of writing. But Calvino straddles two approaches--commentary and story--and never commits to either. I come away from reading this neither as from a fictional dream (thanks, Ken) nor stimulated by ideas. I just come away feeling teased--bullied almost.

I don’t dislike all post-modernist fiction. I don’t believe every story must have a beginning and an end, as Calvino asks at the end of this book. But stories must make you want to keep reading, and on that count, for me, this failed epically.

Perhaps Calvino wrote something I’d like better, but although my mom would have forgiven him quickly, I don’t like being bullied and I may hold a grudge against him for a long time.

If on A Winter's Night a Traveler is a beautifully written gem of postmodernist writing, no doubt about that. Often called an experimental novel, it is praised with a good reason. Italo Calvino managed not only to make a reader feel a part of the story, but to make the reader a creator of it in a way. Initially, a reader might feel confused because Italo plays with conventions, drives parallel plots and often addresses the reader but he wraps it all quite nicely. The result is an unique book that speaks volumes about both the process of reading and writing as well as literature as a whole.


I decided to take some time for myself today and opted it would be best to spend it by rereading this postmodern classic. A time well spend, I should say. I quite liked this novel the first time I read it, but it is definitely a kind of book that deserves a reread if for no other reason than because it is a novel that talks brilliantly about our need to read and reread books.


...“I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext.”

Moreover, this novel is wonderfully philosophical at times. You will find few postmodernist novels that have captured so much wisdom among its pages. As much as I enjoyed the experimental parts of it and the challenging of the writing conventions, what I enjoyed the most were the philosophical passages, the one that speak of love, reading and existence as such.

“If you think about it, reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing. If we assume that writing manages to go beyond the limitations of the author, it will continue to have a meaning only when it is read by a single person and passes through his mental circuits. Only the ability to be read by a given individual proves that what is written shares in the power of writing, a power based on something that goes beyond the individual. The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes.”

“Lovers' reading of each other's bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeat itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansion, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against moments, recovering time?”

(2.5)