cubehead27 's review for:

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino

5.0

adventurous challenging emotional funny hopeful inspiring lighthearted mysterious reflective relaxing sad tense

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This is a lot more than just a book, I think. This novel is literary entropy. Reading it, all that is solid and defined about books is shattered into a thousand pieces which reflect light back on each other and seem to open up a window to the infinite. Calvino resoundingly succeeds in perhaps the most ambitious project a writer can engage in: he turns the reflective powers of the written word back upon itself. No book can stand on its own; all books, all stories, fragments, and sentences, all readings and conversations are incomplete, contingent, and undefined. Neither do they end on the page - they extend into the minds, actions, societies, and worlds of their writers and readers, who - like texts - bleed into one another and overlap. At the foundation of everything there is no subject and no object; no "you" and no "I". There is only undifferentiated substance, and energy, and thought. Calvino reminds us that as humans - as incomplete fragments of the universe that are nonetheless capable of language and communication - we are blessed with the opportunity to participate in this process of cosmic articulation and rearticulation. And that, I think, is a really beautiful thing.