If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Softcover

Italo Calvino

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156439611 ISBN 13: 9780156439619

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982

Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers.

 

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.

Review:

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 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."

From the Back Cover:

This exhilarating interactive novel--in which the reader, lured into the text by the enticements of Italo Calvino's splendid intelligence, turns into the book's central character--was its author's triumphant response to the question of whether the art of fiction could survive the vast changes taking place in the communications technology of our world.

• Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
• Publication date: 1982
• ISBN 10: 0156439611
• ISBN 13: 9780156439619
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 260