if on a winter's night a traveler

Book Review Article Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), translation into English by William Weaver of the original Italian, Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore Calvino’s tour de force of a novel is actually an anti-novel, and one of the most creative works about reading and writing fiction that I have ever read. In order to avoid confusion in this review I will use “the Calvino novel” when referring to the actual book we hold in our hands, as distinct from the many other novels that show up in the narrative. The book begins with a direct address to the reader, who is you. For purposes of discussion throughout this review, we will call this reader “Actual Reader.” “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. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, ‘No, I don’t want to watch TV!’ Raise your voice—they won’t hear you otherwise—‘I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!’” This goes on for several pages, during which the reader is advised on how to find the most comfortable position for reading, how to adjust the light to avoid eyestrain, etc. Such a beginning suggests immediately that you the reader are to play an active role as a character in the book. The direct address to the reader goes so far as to define that reader, to describe what kind of person he/she is: “It’s not that you expect anything in particular from this particular book. You’re the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything.” Hold it. How can the author/narrator possibly know what kind of person I, the reader, am? What can he know about any of his readers? We are soon to discover that the reader addressed here—we will refer to him throughout this review as “You Reader”—is actually a male character made up by the narrator. In fact, You Reader is the main protagonist of the book. But this is not to say that Actual Reader plays no role in the narrative. More on this later. Sparking on the pages from the very start are Calvino’s scintillating imagination and wit. His narrator leads You Reader into a bookstore to buy the book (this book), then spends a whole page classifying various types of books. E.g., Books You Needn’t Read; Books Read Even Before You Open Them, Since They Belong To The Category of Books Read Before Being Written; Books You’ve Been Planning to Read for Ages; Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too. And more. The subject of Calvino’s Traveler is reading and readers. Ancillary, but closely allied to that main subject is that of writing, especially the writing of fiction. Questions asked or implied repeatedly: What is a reader? What is reading? Why and how do we read? What is fiction? What is good fiction and what is bad? What are political attitudes toward fiction? How do our lives become interwoven with the fiction we read? And many more. If on a winter’s night a traveler was first published in the late seventies of the twentieth century, when reading and readers of fiction were still, at least relatively, flourishing. For us who read the book today, forty years later, it may appear to be a kind of anachronism, since today reading is ever of less importance, and readers—especially of a piece of fiction as “difficult” as this one—are in ever shorter supply. Chapter Three begins with a description of the tactile joys of using a knife to cut the uncut pages of a book as you read—an experience limited only to older readers of books even in the 1970s, and a suggestion of how far the modern reader—and the modern non-reader—are from issues addressed by the narrative. The scene in the bookstore describes how You Reader selects the book to be read, picking the book (this book) up, checking the pages to be assured it is not too long, consulting the blurbs on the back: “Of course, this circling of the book, too, this reading around it before reading inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new book.” About the blurbs: “you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don’t say a great deal. So much the better; there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message the book itself must communicate directly.” Of course, at the time he wrote his lines about the shouting blurbs on his book, Calvino could not have yet known exactly what those blurbs would shout. On the back cover of my paperback copy we read, among other things, “A marvelous book,” and “Calvino is a wizard.” Do we believe these enthusiastic shoutings before we read the book? Of course not. Only the naïve reader actually believes blurbs on back covers. Few books that are praised as marvelous in the blurbs will actually turn out to be marvelous. But guess what, reader? This one, this Traveler, actually does turn out to be marvelous.  Although not titled as such, the beginning of the novel is actually an introduction. On page 9 the narrator says to the reader, who has already read almost the whole first, introductory chapter, “So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page.” A jolt for the reader—both You Reader and Actual Reader—but also one more bit of coruscating wit from the author. The second chapter has the same title as that of the book as a whole—If on a winter’s night a traveler—and it actually does describe a winter’s night and a traveler. We presume that this is the beginning of a novel, and it is, but only sort of. We start with a train station, with steam from a locomotive clouding things over. In fact, a cloud of smoke “hides part of the first paragraph . . . . . . and the pages of the book are clouded like the windows of an old train, the cloud of smoke rests on the sentences.” This imagery suggests and foreshadows the haziness that is to be characteristic of the plot of Calvino’s book as a whole. We’re in a bar, in a train station buffet, and a traveler whom we presume to be the protagonist of this whole long book walks into “a setting you know by heart,” a place with “the special odor of stations after the last train has left.” Then, suddenly, the man experiencing the station-odor is an ‘I’ narrator. “I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather, that man is called ‘I’ and you know nothing else about him…” Next comes a remark addressed to the reader: “For a couple of pages now you have been reading on. . . . . . the sentences continue to move in vagueness, grayness, in a kind of no man’s land of experience. Watch out: it is surely a method of involving you gradually, capturing you in the story before you realize it—a trap.” The idea of the reader’s being entrapped in a narrative is to recur several times later on, is, in fact, a leitmotiv of the book as a whole. The ‘I’ narrator in the train station is confused, wondering what exactly he is doing in the story. He, the traveler, vaguely suspects that he is here to pass on to somebody the wheeled suitcase he has with him. He feels not exactly in a story, but in the makings of a story that could veer off in any direction, according to the whim of the author. He repeatedly tries to phone someone from a public telephone, hoping to find out what to do next. The phone rings, no answer. “I know only that this first chapter is taking a while to break free of the station and the bar.” A first chapter in a novel, featuring a character whose ontology is shaky: “I am called ‘I’ and this is the only thing that you know about me.” He hopes that the action will soon remove him from this train station and take him elsewhere. He senses that there is some authorial force behind the narrative that he is in: “By the very fact of writing ‘I’ the author feels driven to put into this ‘I’ a bit of himself, of what he feels or imagines he feels.” So now we pull the author into the book, since any ‘I’ narrator is, at least in part, emblematic of the author himself, the real writer behind everything. As of this point we have three characters: the traveler, the reader (You Reader), and the author—but all three are fictitious. To the extent that there is a plot, here’s how it goes. The I narrator was to come to the station with his suitcase on wheels, was to accidentally on purpose bump into another man with exactly the same kind of suitcase. After saying the password, the second man was to leave his suitcase with the narrator/traveler and take the other’s suitcase. They were to exchange suitcases and go their separate ways, but the second man does not show up, and the traveler is left in a quandary, hanging out as a stranger in a train station buffet where all the locals know each other. The rest of the chapter develops this plot, first describing the locals in the buffet, then mentioning how the local doctor and police chief are soon to arrive—bets are made on which of these men will arrive first. When the police chief comes in he murmurs the secret password to the traveler, then whispers to him that the jig is up: “They’ve killed Jan. Clear out.” The traveler takes another train, the 11:00 express, departs. End of Ch. 1. Or rather, end of the short story that bears the title of the book as a whole and is the first of many short stories to come. These stories will be billed as first chapters in a succession of novels by various authors, but they are short stories nonetheless. As for the traveler/spy in the train station, his tale is done, and he will not appear again in Calvino’s novel. Nor will any of the other characters from the first story.  The second chapter begins with still more direct address to a you reader (You Reader), who it seems has noticed that certain passages in the book repeat themselves. “You are the sort of reader who is sensitive to such refinements; you are quick to catch the author’s intentions, and nothing escapes you.” Then a revelation: there has been an error in the printing of the book, and the same pages have been bound inside twice. So begins the SNAFU theme that will run throughout the rest of the Calvino novel. Shortly into this chapter it becomes apparent that the reader addressed as “you” is not really Actual Reader, but a fictitious reader who was trying to read the story of the traveler in the train station. He (You Reader) takes the defective book back to the bookstore, where he hopes to exchange it for a copy with pages correctly bound, but the bookseller informs him that he had the wrong book. Pages from a novel by the Polish writer Tazio Bazakbal, Outside the town of Malbork, had been incorrectly bound into the book about the winter traveler. You Reader now assumes that the episode he has read came out of the Polish novel, and since he wants to continue reading that story he buys a copy of Bazakbal’s book. The bookseller informs him that another reader, a young woman has done the same, and that she is still in the store. You Reader meets her, thereby setting up another theme—that of romantic love—which will run through the remainder of the Calvino novel. “And so the Other Reader makes her happy entrance into your field of vision.” The word ‘your’ in this sentence refers to You Reader, protagonist of the book, but it also makes an oblique reference to Actual Reader. This double-referencing is rife throughout the book. Other Reader’s name, we are to discover later, is Ludmilla Vipiteno, and, after You Reader, she is to be the second most important character in the action of Calvino’s novel. At this point we have the story of a reader reading a novel, but we have in addition the tale of two readers communing as they read the same novel, or novels. But when he gets his copy of the Polish novel home and begins reading it, You Reader discovers that in buying the Bazakbal book he has stumbled into a totally different story. This sets the pattern for the remainder of Calvino’s Traveler, a book in which a reader is to read the first chapters of ten different novels by different authors.  Outside the town of Malbork Although this is a new story in a different novel there is something familiar about the style: “An odor of frying wafts at the opening of the page, of onion in fact, onion being fried, a bit scorched . . . Rape oil, the text specifies.” At the beginning of the first novel there was an intrusion of smoke wafting over the pages, and here an intrusion of frying grease. The narrative, here as elsewhere later, will be not only a story, but also to some extent an account of how a story may be written. In the middle of this scene setting up the action—describing “our kitchen at Kudwiga” and the people preparing food—a new ‘I’ narrator (named Gritzvi) suddenly pops up: “Mr. Kauderer had arrived the night before with his son [Ponko], and he would be going away this morning, taking me in the son’s place.” The main action of this first chapter describes a fight between Gritzvi and Ponko, the boy who had come to live in Gritzvi’s house to “acquire the techniques of grafting rowans.” Gritzvi will go to live with Ponko’s people, and there is the sense that they will exchange identities. The fight involves a kind of I rolled over him, he rolled over me, we rolled over us: “I had the sensation that in this struggle the transformation was taking place, and when he rose he would be me and I him.” “The page you’re reading should convey the violent contact of dull and painful blows, of fierce and lacerating responses.” In addition to describing the fight, the narrator tells how the reader should perceive the fight, which, once again, reminds us that Calvino’s text is, primarily, about reading. This first chapter of what is supposed to be Bazakbal’s Polish novel implies that later on the two main characters will exchange girlfriends as well as places. It also brings in a kind of “Romeo and Juliet” theme, about family feuds and vendettas among Ponko’s people, the Kauderers, and his girlfriend Zwida’s people, the Ozkarts. Next comes another SNAFU. This time some blank pages have been bound into You Reader’s copy of the Polish book. Now we’re into the structural pattern that obtains for the entire remainder of Calvino’s novel. One snafu follows hard upon the heels of the last snafu. You Reader reads what he thinks is the continuation of a novel whose first chapter he has just read—only to discover, each time, that he is into the first chapter of an entirely different novel. Furthermore, the identity and authorship of the book he had just begun reading is often called into question. Suspecting that the story of Ponko and Gritzvi is not a translation from the Polish, You Reader consults an encyclopedia. He discovers that the place names mentioned are in the once independent European country of Cimmeria—capital Örkko, national language Cimmerian. Unfortunately, Cimmeria no longer exists as a country, having been absorbed by other European powers; its language and culture are now in desuetude. You Reader phones Other Reader Ludmilla, who confirms that her copy of the novel also contains blank pages. She suggests that they meet at the university, to consult with Prof. Uzzi-Tuzzi, a specialist in Bothno-Ugaric languages, including the language of Cimmerian—“a dead department of a dead literature in a dead language” is how the professor later is to describe his place of employment. While wandering around at the university in search of Uzzi-Tuzzi, confused You Reader seems “lost in the book with white pages, unable to get out of it.” He comes upon a young man named Irnerio, a friend of Ludmilla’s who does not read books, who, in fact, has unlearned the very act of reading. As it later turns out, Irnerio is an artist, who makes sculptures, statues, pictures out of the books he does not read. This character is emblematic, perhaps, of what is to happen to words in books in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century; the words being ever more cramped and crowded out on the page by pictorial imagery. When You Reader describes the Cimmerian novel he is searching for (about Ponko and Gritzvi), Prof. Uzzi-Tuzzi immediately recognizes it as Leaning from the steep slope, by Ukko Ahti. He takes the book down from his shelves and begins translating it aloud from Cimmerian into English—and of course it turns out to be a totally different story.  SPACE LIMITATIONS ON AMAZON: THIS WHOLE BOOK REVIEW ARTICLE IS AVAILABLE AT dactylreview.com  So ends the anti-novel than may be the greatest twentieth century book ever written on the theme of readers and reading of fiction. Hunkered down against the computer age in their bunkers, the last dogged readers of the late twenty-first century—still holding out against all odds to keep the act of reading literary fiction operative—may one day look back to this Calvino book as their inspiration. Already in the late 1970s, when he wrote this book, Calvino, fortified by his apparent in-depth study of French semiotics and deconstruction of text, came up with a multitude of takes on the subject of what reading is and what writing is—with particular reference to the reading and writing of artistic fiction. While his prescience is impressive, he certainly could not have predicted what reading has become roughly forty years later, nor what it is likely to become by the end of the twenty-first century. Already in the U.S. today more people read books on digital devices than on print. This in itself changes the act of reading in subtle ways. And insidious algorithms, which are intruding into the Liberal Dream of human free will at a dazzling pace, are already at work on Kindle devices that can collect data on readers as they read. Already your Kindle can monitor which parts of a book you read quickly and which slowly, and on which page you take a break or even abandon the book. As Kindle devices are upgraded in the near future they will be able to determine how each sentence you read influences your blood pressure and heart rate, what made you laugh, cry, or be angry. “Soon, books will read you while you are reading them.” Be prepared to be read, reader of the twenty-first century. Information in the last two paragraphs is from Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, p. 348-49.

I am in agreement with the fourth and fifth readers. Just as I am the sum of my experiences and each experience exists, not on its own but as a single episode in a much larger narrative, I cannot help but making each book I read "part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of all my readings." Cosmicomics is the first book I read by Italo Calvino, and I could not help but search for shades of that in this book as I transformed it and allowed it to "enter into a relationship with the books I have read previously, [to] become their corollary or development or confutation or glass or reference text." I often wonder how my opinion of a book - or anything I consume - would change if I could consume that thing without the influence of me. This particular book certainly gave me cause to ponder that question rather extensively. Which, given what I was hoping to find in the pages, was really quite a surprise. I think I was looking for a love story. I want to share words on a page with someone. I want to think that another pair of eyes is taking in the same words as mine and transforming them in their own unique way to fit their own unique overall and unitary book. I want to delve into our shared experience and take apart the details of how and why we were affected so differently and marvel at the ways in which we were affected similarly. I've felt that shared experience before, long to feel it again, and believed that this book was going to take me on that journey once more. I wanted to see the ups and downs of a relationship related by and existing within the shared words and thoughts of others. I wanted the hero and the heroine, "having passed all tests, get married" and not die. So from the outset, I fell in love with this book. The point-of-view, the internal dialogue, the fear and the hope... everything was related beautifully, and I easily lost myself in pursuit of that Other Reader. As the story progressed, however, I felt like I was losing my grasp on the love story I thought I was reading. I tried to read into each of the external novels something affecting the overall story... something tying it all together... something that made me see how our two readers were growing closer with their reading. Once the two separated over the boundary line of those who make books and those who read them, I think the author finally shook me free from my preconceived notions of what I was reading. While I felt like the stories themselves certainly became easier to understand and stood more on their own after the Cimmerian episodes, I also was able to change my focus and begin to enjoy each episode on its own much more fully than I had before. It was as though he was trying to teach me how to step outside of my unitary book and value these snippets of different times and places without resolution solely for their existence. Once I got that, I began enjoying the individual stories as much, if not more than, the framing device of the love story. Was it possible to consume these new narratives in something approaching a vacuum? I was getting there. I believe I had about half the book to read with my new point-of-view, but while I enjoyed it, I still couldn't get what I wanted to see out of my mind. This was becoming a 3-star review, but it had to wait for the end. I was so scared that this book would end without an ending and leave me searching for non-existent resolutions. Rarely have I had such anticipation for the end of a novel to tie things back together and let me resume my normal breathing pattern. And not since One Hundred Years of Solitude (Everyman's Library (Cloth)) 1st (first) Edition by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gregory Rabassa published by Everyman's Library (1995) has the ending paid off so brilliantly. See? Even now I am attempting to transform this book and fit it into my greater story. So to watch Calvino turn this around on me and bring everything to a wholly satisfying and twisting conclusion was an absolute pleasure. I am, as he said, "always a possible me." "The only truth I can write is that of the instant I am living," and I am pleased to write this now as the me who exists today. There was much here that simply aligned with my life and my current reading habits. I do not know if I would feel the same about this book had, "I read it when I retired... since then I think that it wouldn't be the same thing anymore." As it is, I am pleased with the resolutions, intrigued by the storylines, and amazed by the author's ability to pull me out and around myself to make this somewhat academic study on the nature of writing, reading, and being read flow and fill up my mind without me even really seeing it happen. There is more to say, but I will have to do it later and as a new person. But for now I need, "just a moment... I have almost finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino."

good clean book.

Bon livre.

A truly unique and intriguing piece of literature. I've read it many times but bought it for my Kindle to enjoy again. A fun read.

I really enjoyed If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, even if the mechanics of the book grated in exactly the way the author intended. Over and over he takes you right up to the edge of revelation only to, in a playfully sadistic way, pull you back from the edge. The world seems to flex in both directions as you become an actor on the stage he sets, move between genders and roles, and in some ways, participate in the action. It's manipulative, but remains, quite a ride.

I bought this on a whim and it's one of my favourite books now. So well written, and you never know what's going to happen next.