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

2.0

I have 30 pages left but I seriously cannot be bothered to finish this novel. This kind of "postmodern" writing, where the plot is hyperaware of being a plot in a novel, where the writer explicitly says things like "here the story should portray my spirit shaken as by a hurricane..." or "I would like my story to express all this through details of..." rather than actually writing a story that has the intended effect he wants the reader to feel, where secret societies plot against one another for the sake of confusion of the narrative, where fragments of other narratives are introduced and immediately dropped for the sake of "upending typical narrative structure" or some other BS, leaves you with absolutely nothing. There's nothing here. There's no story, no characters, no particularly strong writing, nothing thematically interesting. You get the impression that literally anyone could've written this book. It pretends at being heady and intellectual and postmodern but comes off as something some guy wrote because he had 13 ideas for novels but didn't have the will to see any of them through. If this were published today it would be written off as a cringey circle jerk. Bleh.