A review by captlychee
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

2.0

This is a competently written, very well translated but pretty mediocre book. The author is overwhelmed by his own cleverness and bashes away at the ol' macchina da scrivere to produce these painfully self-reflexive insights into the craft of creating a fictional world. The author appears as a character, the author himself, some kind of omniscient writer from outside the world of the novel, and even the poor reader who's filled up a bit of his Kindle and emptied a bit of his bank account to be reading the damn thing. This sort of thing is never done well, and the proof of it is this book. [a:Mickey Spillane|50948|Mickey Spillane|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1318950096p2/50948.jpg] did a better job of directly addressing the reader, and only went on for 0.5% of the time Calvino does.

This should be read only in the context of studying postmodernism, because it's a good example of why the movement is ending, not with a bang but a whimper, and it can probably prepare you for the extreme faux naivete of [b:Sexing the Cherry|15050|Sexing the Cherry|Jeanette Winterson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328824090l/15050._SX50_.jpg|922184].