Summary
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narration—”when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded.” Italo Calvino’s novel is in one sense a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader, ultimately end up married, having almost finished If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading. The Reader buys a fashionable new book, which opens with an exhortation: “Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.” Alas, after 30 or so pages, he discovers that his copy is corrupted, and consists of nothing but the first section, over and over. Returning to the bookshop, he discovers the volume, which he thought was by Calvino, is actually by the Polish writer Bazakbal. Given the choice between the two, he goes for the Pole, as does the Other Reader, Ludmilla. But this copy turns out to be by yet another writer, as does the next, and the next.
The real Calvino intersperses 10 different pastiches—stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition—with explorations of how and why we choose to read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other. If on a Winter’s Night is dazzling, vertiginous, and deeply romantic. “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.”
Format: Hardback (263 Pages) Publisher: Vintage Classics Purchase: Bookshop, Amazon,
My Thoughts
I honestly don’t know what to make of this book—which is exactly why I plan to reread it in the future. For now, I’m giving it 3.5 out of 5 stars, though that rating might change on a second read.
If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller is certainly a challenge to wrap your head around and not for the faint-hearted. It’s an intellectual puzzle of a novel, and I even found my vocabulary expanding with words like edulcorate and excogitate making an appearance.
There’s no doubt this is a literary classic, and Italo Calvino has a dedicated cult following. However, for me, it’s a bit of a Marmite book—you either love it or hate it. I enjoyed the beginning and the ending, but the middle dragged at times, and I found it slow in places.
The novel consists of 22 chapters: 12 numbered chapters that tell one continuous story, and in between them, fragments of different unfinished novels, each with a unique title. But interestingly, if you string together the titles of these fragmented stories, they almost form a coherent sentence:
“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?”
Then there’s the overarching story in the numbered chapters, where you—the reader—become the protagonist alongside another reader, Ludmilla, as you both search for the rest of If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, all while navigating a strange and surreal love affair.
This is the first book in my #50BooksAt50Challenge, and it originally came out when I was just three or four years old, way back in 1979. It’s certainly a unique reading experience, but one I feel I need to dedicate more time to on a future read.
