If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1784870617 ISBN 13: 9781784870614

Publisher: Vintage Classics, 2015

Calvino's masterpiece opens with a scene that's reassuringly commonplace: apparently. Indeed, it's taking place now. A reader goes into a bookshop to buy a book: not any book, but the latest Calvino, the book you are holding in your hands. Or is it? Are you the reader? Is this the book? Beware. All assumptions are dangerous on this most bewitching switch-back ride to the heart of storytelling.

About the Author:

Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. During the war he was a member of the Italian Resistance and joined the Communist Party, although he later left in 1957. One of the most respected writers of our time, his best-known works of fiction include Invisible Cities, If on a winter's night a traveller, Marcovaldo and Mr Palomar. In 1981 he was awarded the prestigious French Legion d'Honneur. He died in Siena in 1985.

Review:

"Breathtakingly inventive" -- David Mitchell "The greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century" * Guardian * "Reading Calvino, you're constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before.This is highly unnerving: fortunately you're usually too busy laughing to go mad... I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends" -- Salman Rushdie "A devastating, wonderfully ingenious parody of all those dreary best-sellers you buy at the airport... It is a "world novel": take it with you next time you plan to travel in an armchair" -- Lorna Sage * Observer * "A brilliant work of the imagination and the intellect working in union.And, by the way, it's very funny also" * Scotsman *