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nofinersteiner 's review for:
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
by Italo Calvino
A very theoretical "novel" on what it means to read, write, be a Reader, a Writer, etc. On the one hand, the structure and discourse of the book focus on topics I find interesting: what expectations does a Reader hold for the book? How does language work? What is always left unsaid/unreached by the limiting capacity of language? Very pleasing to my inner-English major.
At the same time, the novelty of the book's structure (10 beginnings to novels that are never finished, intertwined by a Reader trying to find the rest of the text) wears off about halfway. The Reader discovers a vast plot of Apocrypha, false texts, fake countries, a bizarre hall of mirrors that dilute the meaning of author and text. Again, it's hypothetically very interesting, but I'm was not committed to the plot point of the global conspiracy of the translator character. Felt a little ridiculous. Going for big comedy and landing at half-baked.
Ugh! As I'm putting these quotes in, it's one after the other of banger quotes. But the book is strong as a network of great ideas and quotes about reading/writing, rather than a self-standing novel.
Quotes I liked:
"But something has changed since yesterday. Your reading is no longer solitary: you think of the Other Reader, who, at this same moment, is also opening the book; and there, the novel to be read is superimposed by a possible novel to be lived, the continuation of your story with her, or better still, the beginning of a possible story. This is how you have changed since yesterday, you who insisted you preferred a book, something solid, which lies before you, easily defined, enjoyed without risks, to a real-life experience, always elusive, discontinuous, debated. Does this mean that the book as become an instrument, a channel of communication, a rendezvous? This does not mean its reading will grip you less: on the contrary, something has been added to its powers" (32).
"There are days when everything I see seems to me chawed with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external events of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me" (55).
"In any case, the person who finds this diary will have one certain advantage over me: with a written language it is aways possible to reconstruct a dictionary and a grammar, isolate sentences, transcribe them or paraphrase them in another language, whereas I am trying to read in the succession of things presented to me even day the world's intentions toward me, and I grope my way, knowing that there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurks in these things" (61).
"academic envelope serves only to protect everything the story says and does not say, an inner afflatus always on the verge of being dispersed at contact with the air, the echo of a vanished knowledge revealed in the penumbra and in tacit allusions. Torn between the necessity to interject glosses on multiple meanings of the text and the awareness that all interpretation is a use of violence and caprice against a text, the professor, when faced by the most complicated passages, could find no better way of aiding comprehension than to read them in the original" (68-69).
"Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be" (72).
"For many years, Cavedagna has followed books as they are made, bit by bit, he sees books be born and die every day, and yet the true books for him remain others, those of the time when for him they were like messages from other worlds. And so it is with authors: he deals with them every day, he knows their fixations, indecisions, susceptibilities, egocentricities, and yet the true authors remain those who for him were only a name on a jacket, a word that was part of the title, authors who had the same reality as their characters, as the places mentioned in the books, who existed and didn't exist at the same time" (101-102).
"that privileged relationship with books which is peculiar to the reader: the ability to consider what is written as something finished and definitive, to which there is nothing to be added, from which there is nothing to be removed" (115).
"Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books" (142).
"One reads alone, even in another's presence" (147).
"You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others' words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other" (147-148).
"Everything has already begun before, the first one of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book" (153).
"all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being' (155).
"two parallel readings will accompany the approach of sleep; first you, then you will turn out the light; returning from separated universes, you will find each other fleetingly in the darkness, where all separations are erased, before divergent dreams draw you again, one to one side, and one to the other. But do not wax ironic on this prospect of conjugal harmony: what happier image of a couple could you set against it?" (157).
"How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone's ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person! Style, taste, individual philosophy, subjectivity, cultural background, real experience, psychology, talent, tricks of the trade: all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities" (171).
"I read in a book that the objectivity of thought can be expressed using the verb "to think" in the impersonal third person: saying not "I think" but "it thinks" as we say "it rains." There is thought in the universe--this is the constant from which we must set out every time" (176).
"If I think I must write one book, all the problems of how this book should be and how it should not be block me and keep me going forward. If, on the contrary, I think that I am writing a whole library, I feel suddenly lightened: I know that whatever I write will be integrated, contradicted, balanced, amplified, buried by the hundreds of volumes that remain for me to write" (182).
"It is on the page, not before, that the word, sen that of the prophetic rapture, becomes definitive, that is to say, becomes writing. It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the non written becomes legible, that is, through the uncertainties of spieling, the occasional lapses, oversights, unchecked leaps of the word and the pen. Otherwise what is outside of us should not insist on communicating through the word, spoken or written: let it send its messages by other paths" (182-183).
"The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust" (254).
"reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext" (255).
"For years, I have been coming to this library, and I explore it volume by volume, shelf by shelf, but I could demonstrate to you that I have done nothing but continue the reading of a single book" (256).
"Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death" (259).
At the same time, the novelty of the book's structure (10 beginnings to novels that are never finished, intertwined by a Reader trying to find the rest of the text) wears off about halfway. The Reader discovers a vast plot of Apocrypha, false texts, fake countries, a bizarre hall of mirrors that dilute the meaning of author and text. Again, it's hypothetically very interesting, but I'm was not committed to the plot point of the global conspiracy of the translator character. Felt a little ridiculous. Going for big comedy and landing at half-baked.
Ugh! As I'm putting these quotes in, it's one after the other of banger quotes. But the book is strong as a network of great ideas and quotes about reading/writing, rather than a self-standing novel.
Quotes I liked:
"But something has changed since yesterday. Your reading is no longer solitary: you think of the Other Reader, who, at this same moment, is also opening the book; and there, the novel to be read is superimposed by a possible novel to be lived, the continuation of your story with her, or better still, the beginning of a possible story. This is how you have changed since yesterday, you who insisted you preferred a book, something solid, which lies before you, easily defined, enjoyed without risks, to a real-life experience, always elusive, discontinuous, debated. Does this mean that the book as become an instrument, a channel of communication, a rendezvous? This does not mean its reading will grip you less: on the contrary, something has been added to its powers" (32).
"There are days when everything I see seems to me chawed with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external events of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me" (55).
"In any case, the person who finds this diary will have one certain advantage over me: with a written language it is aways possible to reconstruct a dictionary and a grammar, isolate sentences, transcribe them or paraphrase them in another language, whereas I am trying to read in the succession of things presented to me even day the world's intentions toward me, and I grope my way, knowing that there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurks in these things" (61).
"academic envelope serves only to protect everything the story says and does not say, an inner afflatus always on the verge of being dispersed at contact with the air, the echo of a vanished knowledge revealed in the penumbra and in tacit allusions. Torn between the necessity to interject glosses on multiple meanings of the text and the awareness that all interpretation is a use of violence and caprice against a text, the professor, when faced by the most complicated passages, could find no better way of aiding comprehension than to read them in the original" (68-69).
"Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be" (72).
"For many years, Cavedagna has followed books as they are made, bit by bit, he sees books be born and die every day, and yet the true books for him remain others, those of the time when for him they were like messages from other worlds. And so it is with authors: he deals with them every day, he knows their fixations, indecisions, susceptibilities, egocentricities, and yet the true authors remain those who for him were only a name on a jacket, a word that was part of the title, authors who had the same reality as their characters, as the places mentioned in the books, who existed and didn't exist at the same time" (101-102).
"that privileged relationship with books which is peculiar to the reader: the ability to consider what is written as something finished and definitive, to which there is nothing to be added, from which there is nothing to be removed" (115).
"Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books" (142).
"One reads alone, even in another's presence" (147).
"You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others' words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other" (147-148).
"Everything has already begun before, the first one of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book" (153).
"all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being' (155).
"two parallel readings will accompany the approach of sleep; first you, then you will turn out the light; returning from separated universes, you will find each other fleetingly in the darkness, where all separations are erased, before divergent dreams draw you again, one to one side, and one to the other. But do not wax ironic on this prospect of conjugal harmony: what happier image of a couple could you set against it?" (157).
"How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone's ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person! Style, taste, individual philosophy, subjectivity, cultural background, real experience, psychology, talent, tricks of the trade: all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities" (171).
"I read in a book that the objectivity of thought can be expressed using the verb "to think" in the impersonal third person: saying not "I think" but "it thinks" as we say "it rains." There is thought in the universe--this is the constant from which we must set out every time" (176).
"If I think I must write one book, all the problems of how this book should be and how it should not be block me and keep me going forward. If, on the contrary, I think that I am writing a whole library, I feel suddenly lightened: I know that whatever I write will be integrated, contradicted, balanced, amplified, buried by the hundreds of volumes that remain for me to write" (182).
"It is on the page, not before, that the word, sen that of the prophetic rapture, becomes definitive, that is to say, becomes writing. It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the non written becomes legible, that is, through the uncertainties of spieling, the occasional lapses, oversights, unchecked leaps of the word and the pen. Otherwise what is outside of us should not insist on communicating through the word, spoken or written: let it send its messages by other paths" (182-183).
"The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust" (254).
"reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext" (255).
"For years, I have been coming to this library, and I explore it volume by volume, shelf by shelf, but I could demonstrate to you that I have done nothing but continue the reading of a single book" (256).
"Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death" (259).