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3.94 AVERAGE
3.94 AVERAGE
adventurous
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
“I would like to be able to write a book that is only an incipit, that maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning, the expectation still not focused on an object. But how could such a book be constructed? Would it break off after the first paragraph? Would the preliminaries be prolonged indefinitely? Would it set the beginning of one tale inside another, as in the Arabian Nights?”
This was flawed but pretty interesting nonetheless. Calvino opens with a second person narration that suggests a stranger and more avant garde book than is actually written here, seemingly narrating me (literally me, sitting on my couch reading If on a winter’s night a traveler) picking up and reading his novel. This obviously becomes untenable after a few sentences, and soon the “you” of this novel, the Reader, detaches from me, Justin, and becomes a more straightforward character in the novelistic sense.
If this type of metaliterature is exhausting you already, you will not like this. There is not much of a plot to be had here—If on a winter’s night a traveler is mostly Calvino’s thoughts on the act of writing, the act of reading, and how the two acts intersect. The protagonist, “you,” is defined solely by being a reader (and I guess by being a man, which I’ll get to later) and the only other major character is largely defined by her reading habits as well—she’s called the Other Reader before her name, Ludmilla, is revealed.
The Reader and Ludmilla meet in a bookstore while searching for a completed version of a novel of which they, frustratingly, only got the first chapter due to a printing error. There are ten “first chapters” of novels of different genres and styles that make up about half of the page length here. These are interspersed with Calvino’s second person narration of the Reader and Ludmilla, who are getting increasingly frustrated by the fact that they can’t seem to find a completed version of any of these ten damned novels.
I guess I’ll start with the novels-within-novel first. These started off fun, got frustrating towards the middle—what is the point of reading the first chapter of a book that I know I won’t be able to finish?—and then became interesting towards the end. Many of these chapters are not written like a novel, but like a summary of a novel, or an idea of a novel: “The novel begins in a railway station,” “The pages of the book are clouded like the windows of an old train.” These were the most engaging, to me, because it didn’t feel like I was reading an unfinished story. Instead, I was thinking about the process of reading, of how I immerse myself into a book when I begin, of how I think about books. I think this is why I enjoyed the middle “first chapter” sections the least—they feel like space fillers, like little vignettes designed to split up the action of the second person chapters. They simply weren’t compelling enough on a narrative level for me to want to read them.
The main storyline featuring the Reader and Ludmilla is present, but intentionally confusing and dadaist—it mostly exists as a framework to discuss ideas about authorship and readership. There is an author character who has writer’s block (wonder who that’s supposed to be), a translator who makes literary forgeries, and a whole bunch of fascist regimes, revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries, and counter-counter-revolutionaries. To be honest, I gave up trying to understand the finer points of the plot by the end, because they’re really not the point.
The point is, as I’ve stated a few times already, to ask interesting questions about books and being a reader. Who is the true curator of a novel, the author or the reader? Is there inherent value in the act of reading, even if the reader is reading a text that was deemed meaningless by the author? Do authors snatch narratives out of the ether and commit them to the physical world by writing (a la Stephen King) or are they creating something de novo, out of their own mind? Calvino asks a lot of very interesting questions, but rarely settles down for long enough to resolve any of them.
So, if the point is to think about this dynamic, why does the character of Ludmilla even exist? This is maybe the most glaring aspect of If on a winter’s night a traveler—its casual misogyny. Ludmilla seems to exist as a narrative parallel to the meta narrative tease that Calvino is pulling on the reader—in the same way that we are unsatisfied by repeatedly getting cut off from a novel right when it gets interesting, the Reader (the character, not the literal reader—god this is difficult to write about) is constantly pursuing Ludmilla only to be met with a series of increasingly difficult obstacles. Ludmilla is a book, in that sense—an object. I guess this isn’t *too* bad, since there are very few fleshed out characters of any gender here. But Ludmilla’s place in the plot and a bizarre sexual encounter that the Reader has with another woman towards the end of the book gave me a bit of the ick.
Anachronistically, what my mind kept returning to while reading was the advent of generative AI and its place in art and, specifically, literature. There is a prescient concept introduced here involving a computer analyzing novels by word count and spitting out imitations of an author’s style, even if the authorial intent is missing. If so much of the pleasure and meaning of a work of art comes from its reader, how important is the role of the artist? Indeed, Ludmilla enjoys reading supposedly meaningless forgeries generated only to create confusion and illustrate the meaningless of life. I know where I stand on this topic, but I would be so curious to hear Calvino’s take.
Certainly unique! I'll be thinking about this one for awhile.
adventurous
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
There is a lot of very interesting exposition about reading/being a reader and I appreciate what was being done by the author I.e. form and theme. But I would have been more impressed and entertained if it wasn't so vapid when it came to the characters, and Women as a whole lol
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
funny
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Stop what you are doing and read this book. I am shook.
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A