xomeera 's review for:

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

3.0

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An imaginative and meta story about reading a book, in which the plot revolves around you, the reader, chasing down the ending of the book you’re reading. With this quirky premise and a playful yet contemplative narrating voice, this novel was both a puzzling and entertaining read, although its repetitive structure made it occasionally tiresome to get through, and the suddenly rampant objectification in the last half of the book was particularly egregious—sometimes to a rage-inducing degree. This novel really shined when it leant into its coy breaking of the fourth wall, its narrative idiosyncrasies, and its dissection and celebration of the nature of reading, but the casual sexism laced throughout really soured my experience with it.