If on a winter's night a traveller

Don't let the other, convoluted and overly artsy reviews keep you away from this masterpiece of a book. I don't give out five-star ratings easily, but here it is justified. Reading "If on a winter's night a traveler" is a wild ride, as unconventional as its title.

Above all, YOU are the protagonist. The narrator addresses YOU for the majority of the novel, and it's YOU who has adventures trying to find out just HOW that darn book continues after you read the first few pages - and then it just stops.

And off you go, embarking on a journey across your city and to far-away places to find out how the plot will develop. On the way, you encounter a fellow reader, literature scholars and students, editors and authors looking for inspiration, and also, uh, censors from an authoritarian state? Bear with me.

Reading this book feels like reading ten books at the same time, but without the confusion you would expect. You, the reader, start reading ten very different books, written in very different styles, and you will find out why that is the case. Mostly.

Listen to me: I usually don't like novels that are about literature and about the love of reading. I think it's cheap and easy to appeal to readers and customers like that. Here, this topic is handled in another way: You are immersed in this world of literature without all the fuss I came to dislike. You're thrown right in the middle of it, and it is just wonderful.

This vibrant array of stories has Calvino adopting the styles of various influences (Borges and Nabakov among others) and playing within them just long enough to build some tension. However, the initial thrill of the frame story seems to get a little lost within its increasingly elaborate tangles. This larger tale seems, at times, fixated on a romantic element. Ultimately it doesn't seem especially concerned with how that unfolds. (I'll also note that the persistence of meta moments can at times feel a little...persistent.)

Many of the stories afford an intoxicating mystery without having to commit long enough to dive very deeply into their implications. It's a set of shooting stars. ( I don't want to undersell the stars, though. Some of them can be fairly thought provoking/affecting, even as a brief incipit.)

The one idea from the larger narrative that stuck with me was this: A great reader can pull truth and authenticity out of something that was written deliberately to be devoid of those things-- and the inverse is also true.

1) "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade."

2) "You, reader, believed that there, on the platform, my gaze was glued to the hands of the round clock of an old station, hands pierced like halberds, in the vain attempt to turn them back, to move backward over the cemetery of spent hours, lying lifeless in their circular pantheon. But who can say that the clock's numbers aren't peeping from rectangular windows, where I see every minute fall on me with a click like the blade of a guillotine?"

3) "It seems impossible, in a big city like Paris, but you can waste hours looking for the right place to burn up a corpse."

4) "At times I convince myself that the woman is reading my true book, the one I should have written long ago, but will never succeed in writing, that this book is there, word for word, that I can see it at the end of my spyglass but cannot read what is written in it, cannot know what was written by that me who I have not succeeded and will never succeed in being. It's no use my sitting down again at the desk, straining to guess, to copy that true book of mine she is reading: whatever I may write will be false, a fake, compared to my true book, which no one except her will ever read."

5) "At times I think of the subject matter of the book to be written as of something that already exists: thoughts already thought, dialogue already spoken, stories already happened, places and settings seen; the book should be simply the equivalent of the unwritten world translated into writing. At other times, on the contrary, I seem to understand that between the book to be written and things that already exist there can be only a kind of complementary relationship: the book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness."

6) "If on a winter's night a traveler
outside the town of Malbork,
leaning from the steep slope
without fear of wind or vertigo,
looks down in the gathering shadow
in a network of lines that enlace,
in a network of lines that intersect,
on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon
around an empty grave---
What story down there awaits its end?
---he asks, anxious to hear the story."

Not even sure how to begin a review on this. It's not a story as much as it is an orchestra made up of many different instruments, apparently playing completely unrelated tunes at great speed. There are, as all reviews have noted, quite a few chapters that consist of the beginnings of novels, all of them interrupted just as you become engrossed; interspersed between them are chapters of the central story, which becomes increasingly ludicrous. In this central story, occasionally, two - or several - of the various apparently unconnected melodies collide in such a way that you momentarily realise the whole thing has been very cleverly crafted (in several places I found myself literally laughing with delight) . . . and then you lose it again. Finally, in the final four or five pages the author draws in all these wildly dancing lines of music into one tightly knit and surprisingly satisfying conclusion.

This isn't a book so much as an experience. It's one of the most unusual things I've read in years.

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is an experimental classic that follows two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader. The Reader buys a fashionable new book that opens with those famous lines “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought.” Thirty pages or so into the book he realises his copy is corrupt and consists of the same thing over and over again. Returning to the book store he discovers that what he thought was Calvino was a book by a Polish writer Bazakbal. Given the choice between the two he goes for the Polish book, as does the Other Reader, but his book turns out to be yet another novel by a different writer, as does the next, and the next.

Trying to write a synopsis for this book is tricky, there is no way I can do the novel justice in a paragraph. This Italian surrealist novel (1979) was translated in 1981 to critical acclaim. The novel is best known for its structure. The odd number chapters are written in second person, but you have to ask yourself is it possible to have a novel in second person. As you read along eventually the narrator “you” does something that will take the reader out of the equation and turning them into a character called You. For instance, in this novel You is male, this will rule out about 50% of the readers in one hit. This doesn’t take away from the enjoyment of this novel but is something I was deeply aware of throughout this book. There were times where I felt like the novel was in first and third person as well, so you end up with characters called You, I and He/She.

This whole book is subjective, I’m sure some people get different things out of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler than I did but that is just what makes for a great novel. I want to talk a little about post-structuralism as I believe this novel is a great example of this literary theory. Firstly you need to understand structuralism, which is a theory that states that in order to understand a piece of literature you need to understand its relationship with the bigger picture, the overarching system or structure. You need to look into its influences, the genre, narrative and any other elements that might be relevant. The problem with this is you going further and further back eventually you might lose sight of the original text. Basically this is a set of specific rules that govern literature. Post-structuralism is basically taking those rules (they often study and analyse the rules) then setting out to critique the premises. It isn’t really throwing out the rules, more demonstrating how the rules don’t always apply.

Italo Calvino doesn’t stop at narrative modes and post-structuralism, the novel explores many more literary themes; the most obvious is the use of metafiction; a book within a book. You won’t find Outside the Town of Malbork by Tazio Bazakbal on Goodreads, I’ve checked. Then you have intertextuality, pastiche, post-modernism and so on. If you are interested in exploring literary theories this novel might be a good way to experience a whole range of different concepts in one hit. I don’t know much about literary theory so I hope my understanding on these concepts have come across as accurate and I haven’t missed it completely. I would love to attend a series of lectures where this book is deconstructed and looked at in real detail; I think that would be incredibly interesting.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a dense or hard-to-read book and I’m aware that talking about literary theory might turn people off this novel but please reconsider. This book is not only devilishly clever but it is beautifully executed. I took my time with this novel because I wanted to re-read sections, write done quotes and just talk about the book to anyone that would listen. If I didn’t borrow this from the library I would have highlighted the entire books (seriously, every line is just that great). I have brought my own copy now (yes, I broke my book buying ban) and I hope to be able to re-read this again. I’m not sure if reading this with others will help but the whole experience of reading this novel is worth sharing.

I’ve heard Italo Calvino is heavily influenced by Vladimir Nabokov which makes a lot of sense to me, the writing style does feel similar, even the humour and wit. A literary labyrinth that is so masterfully executed that the novel needs to be read again and again. I won’t go into any more details as there are a few things you just need to experience. I’m jealous of anyone that gets to read this novel for the first time as that is an experience I will never have again.

I have to wonder why the Vintage classics cover of the word “Traveller” written correctly but throughout the book it is written in the American (wrong) spelling. I have to wonder if there is anything in that. I wonder if there is a reading companion to If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler that you can read alongside this book (similar to Infinite Jest) to discover the brilliance of this novel. I really enjoy Post-Modern literature but there is so much that I’m probably missing.

All book lovers should experience If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, there is nothing like that feeling of pure joy when you read a beautifully clever novel. You never want it to end, that ecstasy is like a drug and you immediately want to read it again only to find that feeling is just not the same. This is a masterpiece, I know I didn’t talk much about the plot but this was so I don’t give anything away. Go read it.

This review originally appeared on my blog; literary-exploration.com/2013/10/27/book-review-if-on-a-winters-night-a-traveler/