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3.94 AVERAGE
3.94 AVERAGE
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
[I'm still reading this book, just writing up some of my notes from my reading, will eventually turn this into a proper review]
This is a highly experimental and densely-written novel about two readers starting to read a book only to find the rest of the story missing and go in search of the rest. The chapters alternate between the main thread (a second person POV of the two readers) and the various stories they encounter (always the beginning of a new novel, each one truncated so we never get to its end).
Second person perspective is already something that's rarely seen in stories because of the kind of awkwardness of the reader's self-insertion into the story, but Calvino has made it work extremely effectively here. We are the reader in the first chapter, being called out ("Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered" is particularly relevant to me).
The named chapters which are the stories are interesting though some I enjoyed more than others. I guess my main gripe with these is that when reading a novel, I generally expect to follow a main plotline, and these chapters are like little diversions that end up going nowhere as none of the stories continue in the next named chapter. So there was this sense of starting and stopping, which broke down the flow of the narrative for me.
There are some great nuggets that Calvino inserts into these stories that link it back to the main themes - "Perhaps it is this story that is a bridge over the void, and as it advances it flings forward news and sensations and emotions to create a ground of upsets both collective and individual in the midst of which a path can be opened while we remain in the dark about many circumstances both historical and geographical" (from "Without fear of wind or vertigo").
.
.
Notes & Spoilers up to Chapter 7 (the named chapter, which is really chapter 14 overall)!!
.
.
.
- ch 5 on publishing houses: "it would seem that those who use books to produce other books are increasing more than those who just like to read books" - true of publishing houses now, eg. books in a series (I recall a rumour that The Hunger Games was supposed to be a standalone but the publisher asked the author to extend it into a trilogy?) - and look at all the new trilogies that follow previous trilogies years later
- I feel like Ludmilla's monologue here about wanting to stay on one side of the "boundary line" of readers and book producers(writers, etc) is curious - "I want to remain one of those who read them, so I take care always to remain on my side of the line. Otherwise, the unsullied pleasure of reading gends, or at least is transformed into something else, which is not what I want. This boundary line is tentative, it tends to get erased"
- "Looks down in the gathering shadow" - narrator has stories upon stories that haven't yet ended, yet he keeps running to create a new story(new life) - basically like the You of the book- except he wants to escape the story into a new one, not seeking out the ending of the story - "It's a story that sooner or later I'll also end up telling, but in the midst of all the others, not giving more importance to one than to another, not putting any special passion into it beyond the pleasure of narrating and remembering" - like reading books/stories for the pleasure, even as you lose track of the countless stories you've read, many of which may be similar in formula - crocodiles, another reptile - serpents in the prev story
- also what's interesting so far - all the story parts are in first person narration, with the protagonist telling you sometimes about the narrative tricks they(the author? in the very first story at the train station, it suggests the 'I' is really a proxy for the author) they are employing
- incredibly imaginative - Father of Stories, an old Indian man who is blind and illiterate, who recites stories word for word that are unpublished, about times and places he cannot possibly know about - a bit of mystery on the Author - the Indian man as "universal source of narrative material"
- translator Marana's letter regarding Flannery's book that he has the beginning of which, which can be completed easily by computers "programmed as they are to develop all the elements of a text with perfect fidelity to the stylistic and conceptual models of the author" - AI! - funny b/c I've been having a lot of conversations with people on AI art & text generators, this boook was published in 1979
- Marana's plane gets hijacked! they are targeting his manuscript (beginning of Flannery's novel) - they are a secret group dedicated to worship of secret books (sounds like a group I'd wanna join tbh)
- Marana & the Sultana - his idea to appease her is to insert a new novel right at the climax of the previous, eg. a character from the first novel starts reading a book which is the second novel & so on... very Arabian Nights (especially since they are in Arabia - Sultan & Sultana) - "a trap-novel designed by the treacherous translator with beginnings of novels that remain suspended"
- HIS PROSE IS SO GOOD - pg 123 a woman on a beach "placing between her person and the beams of the dog days' sun the brief shield of a popular New York magazine"
- what about the women? Women in each story show up but main character is always male - Ms Zwida, the women in Marana's letters who are readers, Bernadette the accomplice - this chapter on Marana's letter was the chapter where I really felt "This is a man writing about women" - the main female character Ludmilla is written as this mysterious, almost elusive being who the main character is trying to catch in a sense, catch up to her reading (he talks about how she's read so much and is always ahead of him), catch her in real life as he keeps trying to meet with her (and sometimes failing or finding someone else instead)
- a funny bit about a female reader strapped to a chair reading a computer's output, with wires attached to her temples to measure her attention to the test - to determine if the computer's output is viable for market - funny b/c I just recently read about Clarkesworld closing reader short story submissions due to getting way too much AI generated works (which are not even good)
- ch 7 - consummation - author has been weaving the parallel of the erotic and reading for the entire book but here it is on clear display - what I find really interesting is the paragraph about the two "reading" each other, and then the man worries that he's essentially being objectified by Ludmilla or is just a substitute for her fantasies ("you being to harbor a doubt: that she is not reading you, single and whole as you are, but using you, using fragments of you detached from the context to constructfor herself a ghostly partner, known to her alone, in the penumbra of her semiconsciousness, and what she is deciphering is this apocryphal visitor, not you") - kind of a turnaround in that Ludmilla becomes a character with her own desires/inner thoughts/fantasies that the man isn't privy to, making it less of a conquest of her
This is a highly experimental and densely-written novel about two readers starting to read a book only to find the rest of the story missing and go in search of the rest. The chapters alternate between the main thread (a second person POV of the two readers) and the various stories they encounter (always the beginning of a new novel, each one truncated so we never get to its end).
Second person perspective is already something that's rarely seen in stories because of the kind of awkwardness of the reader's self-insertion into the story, but Calvino has made it work extremely effectively here. We are the reader in the first chapter, being called out ("Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered" is particularly relevant to me).
The named chapters which are the stories are interesting though some I enjoyed more than others. I guess my main gripe with these is that when reading a novel, I generally expect to follow a main plotline, and these chapters are like little diversions that end up going nowhere as none of the stories continue in the next named chapter. So there was this sense of starting and stopping, which broke down the flow of the narrative for me.
There are some great nuggets that Calvino inserts into these stories that link it back to the main themes - "Perhaps it is this story that is a bridge over the void, and as it advances it flings forward news and sensations and emotions to create a ground of upsets both collective and individual in the midst of which a path can be opened while we remain in the dark about many circumstances both historical and geographical" (from "Without fear of wind or vertigo").
.
.
Notes & Spoilers up to Chapter 7 (the named chapter, which is really chapter 14 overall)!!
.
.
.
Spoiler
- ch 5 on publishing houses: "it would seem that those who use books to produce other books are increasing more than those who just like to read books" - true of publishing houses now, eg. books in a series (I recall a rumour that The Hunger Games was supposed to be a standalone but the publisher asked the author to extend it into a trilogy?) - and look at all the new trilogies that follow previous trilogies years later
- I feel like Ludmilla's monologue here about wanting to stay on one side of the "boundary line" of readers and book producers(writers, etc) is curious - "I want to remain one of those who read them, so I take care always to remain on my side of the line. Otherwise, the unsullied pleasure of reading gends, or at least is transformed into something else, which is not what I want. This boundary line is tentative, it tends to get erased"
- "Looks down in the gathering shadow" - narrator has stories upon stories that haven't yet ended, yet he keeps running to create a new story(new life) - basically like the You of the book- except he wants to escape the story into a new one, not seeking out the ending of the story - "It's a story that sooner or later I'll also end up telling, but in the midst of all the others, not giving more importance to one than to another, not putting any special passion into it beyond the pleasure of narrating and remembering" - like reading books/stories for the pleasure, even as you lose track of the countless stories you've read, many of which may be similar in formula - crocodiles, another reptile - serpents in the prev story
- also what's interesting so far - all the story parts are in first person narration, with the protagonist telling you sometimes about the narrative tricks they(the author? in the very first story at the train station, it suggests the 'I' is really a proxy for the author) they are employing
- incredibly imaginative - Father of Stories, an old Indian man who is blind and illiterate, who recites stories word for word that are unpublished, about times and places he cannot possibly know about - a bit of mystery on the Author - the Indian man as "universal source of narrative material"
- translator Marana's letter regarding Flannery's book that he has the beginning of which, which can be completed easily by computers "programmed as they are to develop all the elements of a text with perfect fidelity to the stylistic and conceptual models of the author" - AI! - funny b/c I've been having a lot of conversations with people on AI art & text generators, this boook was published in 1979
- Marana's plane gets hijacked! they are targeting his manuscript (beginning of Flannery's novel) - they are a secret group dedicated to worship of secret books (sounds like a group I'd wanna join tbh)
- Marana & the Sultana - his idea to appease her is to insert a new novel right at the climax of the previous, eg. a character from the first novel starts reading a book which is the second novel & so on... very Arabian Nights (especially since they are in Arabia - Sultan & Sultana) - "a trap-novel designed by the treacherous translator with beginnings of novels that remain suspended"
- HIS PROSE IS SO GOOD - pg 123 a woman on a beach "placing between her person and the beams of the dog days' sun the brief shield of a popular New York magazine"
- what about the women? Women in each story show up but main character is always male - Ms Zwida, the women in Marana's letters who are readers, Bernadette the accomplice - this chapter on Marana's letter was the chapter where I really felt "This is a man writing about women" - the main female character Ludmilla is written as this mysterious, almost elusive being who the main character is trying to catch in a sense, catch up to her reading (he talks about how she's read so much and is always ahead of him), catch her in real life as he keeps trying to meet with her (and sometimes failing or finding someone else instead)
- a funny bit about a female reader strapped to a chair reading a computer's output, with wires attached to her temples to measure her attention to the test - to determine if the computer's output is viable for market - funny b/c I just recently read about Clarkesworld closing reader short story submissions due to getting way too much AI generated works (which are not even good)
- ch 7 - consummation - author has been weaving the parallel of the erotic and reading for the entire book but here it is on clear display - what I find really interesting is the paragraph about the two "reading" each other, and then the man worries that he's essentially being objectified by Ludmilla or is just a substitute for her fantasies ("you being to harbor a doubt: that she is not reading you, single and whole as you are, but using you, using fragments of you detached from the context to constructfor herself a ghostly partner, known to her alone, in the penumbra of her semiconsciousness, and what she is deciphering is this apocryphal visitor, not you") - kind of a turnaround in that Ludmilla becomes a character with her own desires/inner thoughts/fantasies that the man isn't privy to, making it less of a conquest of her
challenging
mysterious
reflective
A minha jornada a ler este livro é um pouco difícil de descrever, porque começou de forma brilhante, mas esticou tanto que se tornou extremamente bizarra no final.
Se há algo que eu não vou esquecer da leitura deste livro é que eu tive vários momentos em que pensei que ia dar 5 estrelas, mas fui progressivamente retocando a minha classificação até decidir chegar a um meio-termo e dar-lhe 4 estrelas. Eu não tenho dúvida do quão brilhante e genial o autor tem de ser para criar tantos inícios de história como os que dão corpo a este livro, mas à medida que fomos descendo a "toca do coelho" as coisas ficaram tão bizarras, rebuscadas e tão longe da realidade previamente estabelecida que eu não sabia muito bem o que havia de sentir tirando confusão e uma certa frustração por a história estar a ir para dimensões completamente ilógicas e opostas ao que eu estava a adorar no mesmo livro.
Esta classificação não é 2 ou 3 estrelas porque eu consigo ver o génio e o raciocínio do autor e percebo a ideia original. No entanto, frustrou-me tanto que eu queria dar 2 estrelas pela bizarria pegada em que se tornou e pelo final extremamente abrupto entre o Leitor e a Leitora.
Nota em Maio de 2024: Inicialmente tinha dado 4 estrelas devido à genialidade do autor, mas tendo que conta que estou a classificar como me sinto perante este livro e, dois meses depois, ainda continuo com sentimentos muito fortes sobre a mudança na narrativa, decidi baixar para 3 estrelas. Começou muito bem, mas foi ganhando proporções que não gostei e só não baixo para 2 estrelas porque aprecio muito a estrutura do livro e o seu conceito. Quero ler mais Italo Calvino por causa disto, então coloco este livro numa posição neutra porque tem elementos que gosto e não gosto igualmente.
Se há algo que eu não vou esquecer da leitura deste livro é que eu tive vários momentos em que pensei que ia dar 5 estrelas, mas fui progressivamente retocando a minha classificação até decidir chegar a um meio-termo e dar-lhe 4 estrelas. Eu não tenho dúvida do quão brilhante e genial o autor tem de ser para criar tantos inícios de história como os que dão corpo a este livro, mas à medida que fomos descendo a "toca do coelho" as coisas ficaram tão bizarras, rebuscadas e tão longe da realidade previamente estabelecida que eu não sabia muito bem o que havia de sentir tirando confusão e uma certa frustração por a história estar a ir para dimensões completamente ilógicas e opostas ao que eu estava a adorar no mesmo livro.
Esta classificação não é 2 ou 3 estrelas porque eu consigo ver o génio e o raciocínio do autor e percebo a ideia original. No entanto, frustrou-me tanto que eu queria dar 2 estrelas pela bizarria pegada em que se tornou e pelo final extremamente abrupto entre o Leitor e a Leitora.
Nota em Maio de 2024: Inicialmente tinha dado 4 estrelas devido à genialidade do autor, mas tendo que conta que estou a classificar como me sinto perante este livro e, dois meses depois, ainda continuo com sentimentos muito fortes sobre a mudança na narrativa, decidi baixar para 3 estrelas. Começou muito bem, mas foi ganhando proporções que não gostei e só não baixo para 2 estrelas porque aprecio muito a estrutura do livro e o seu conceito. Quero ler mais Italo Calvino por causa disto, então coloco este livro numa posição neutra porque tem elementos que gosto e não gosto igualmente.
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Very interesting in terms of what it's trying to do, the structure of it all, the philosophy of stories, reading and writing. Would be more enjoyable if it was normal about women. The characters were a bit too unlikeable for me, though I don't think that necessarily detracts from the aims of this novel.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Rape, Sexual assault
funny
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
challenging
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
This isn't a story so much as a mediation on why we write stories and how they are consumed. Strangely prescient in the age of AI as it ruminates on plagiarism, automated reading, and the publishing industry. A product of its time in terms of misogyny etc, and frustrating when it jumps from story to story, but definitely an unforgettable treatise on the adventure of reading
Content Warnings
Moderate: Rape, War
mysterious
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
WTF
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
This is an interesting book about books.
I was not really interested in the chapters where there were first chapters of books. I did like though that the book titles together are a sentence.
My favorite parts of the books were the parts where the reader is being directly adressed.
I really like the ending.
This book really makes me think about storytelling and writing and authors bad readers.
I did not particularly like how the female characters were described and written about.
I was not really interested in the chapters where there were first chapters of books. I did like though that the book titles together are a sentence.
My favorite parts of the books were the parts where the reader is being directly adressed.
I really like the ending.
This book really makes me think about storytelling and writing and authors bad readers.
I did not particularly like how the female characters were described and written about.
