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serru 's review for:
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
by Italo Calvino
[I'm still reading this book, just writing up some of my notes from my reading, will eventually turn this into a proper review]
This is a highly experimental and densely-written novel about two readers starting to read a book only to find the rest of the story missing and go in search of the rest. The chapters alternate between the main thread (a second person POV of the two readers) and the various stories they encounter (always the beginning of a new novel, each one truncated so we never get to its end).
Second person perspective is already something that's rarely seen in stories because of the kind of awkwardness of the reader's self-insertion into the story, but Calvino has made it work extremely effectively here. We are the reader in the first chapter, being called out ("Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered" is particularly relevant to me).
The named chapters which are the stories are interesting though some I enjoyed more than others. I guess my main gripe with these is that when reading a novel, I generally expect to follow a main plotline, and these chapters are like little diversions that end up going nowhere as none of the stories continue in the next named chapter. So there was this sense of starting and stopping, which broke down the flow of the narrative for me.
There are some great nuggets that Calvino inserts into these stories that link it back to the main themes - "Perhaps it is this story that is a bridge over the void, and as it advances it flings forward news and sensations and emotions to create a ground of upsets both collective and individual in the midst of which a path can be opened while we remain in the dark about many circumstances both historical and geographical" (from "Without fear of wind or vertigo").
.
.
Notes & Spoilers up to Chapter 7 (the named chapter, which is really chapter 14 overall)!!
.
.
.
- ch 5 on publishing houses: "it would seem that those who use books to produce other books are increasing more than those who just like to read books" - true of publishing houses now, eg. books in a series (I recall a rumour that The Hunger Games was supposed to be a standalone but the publisher asked the author to extend it into a trilogy?) - and look at all the new trilogies that follow previous trilogies years later
- I feel like Ludmilla's monologue here about wanting to stay on one side of the "boundary line" of readers and book producers(writers, etc) is curious - "I want to remain one of those who read them, so I take care always to remain on my side of the line. Otherwise, the unsullied pleasure of reading gends, or at least is transformed into something else, which is not what I want. This boundary line is tentative, it tends to get erased"
- "Looks down in the gathering shadow" - narrator has stories upon stories that haven't yet ended, yet he keeps running to create a new story(new life) - basically like the You of the book- except he wants to escape the story into a new one, not seeking out the ending of the story - "It's a story that sooner or later I'll also end up telling, but in the midst of all the others, not giving more importance to one than to another, not putting any special passion into it beyond the pleasure of narrating and remembering" - like reading books/stories for the pleasure, even as you lose track of the countless stories you've read, many of which may be similar in formula - crocodiles, another reptile - serpents in the prev story
- also what's interesting so far - all the story parts are in first person narration, with the protagonist telling you sometimes about the narrative tricks they(the author? in the very first story at the train station, it suggests the 'I' is really a proxy for the author) they are employing
- incredibly imaginative - Father of Stories, an old Indian man who is blind and illiterate, who recites stories word for word that are unpublished, about times and places he cannot possibly know about - a bit of mystery on the Author - the Indian man as "universal source of narrative material"
- translator Marana's letter regarding Flannery's book that he has the beginning of which, which can be completed easily by computers "programmed as they are to develop all the elements of a text with perfect fidelity to the stylistic and conceptual models of the author" - AI! - funny b/c I've been having a lot of conversations with people on AI art & text generators, this boook was published in 1979
- Marana's plane gets hijacked! they are targeting his manuscript (beginning of Flannery's novel) - they are a secret group dedicated to worship of secret books (sounds like a group I'd wanna join tbh)
- Marana & the Sultana - his idea to appease her is to insert a new novel right at the climax of the previous, eg. a character from the first novel starts reading a book which is the second novel & so on... very Arabian Nights (especially since they are in Arabia - Sultan & Sultana) - "a trap-novel designed by the treacherous translator with beginnings of novels that remain suspended"
- HIS PROSE IS SO GOOD - pg 123 a woman on a beach "placing between her person and the beams of the dog days' sun the brief shield of a popular New York magazine"
- what about the women? Women in each story show up but main character is always male - Ms Zwida, the women in Marana's letters who are readers, Bernadette the accomplice - this chapter on Marana's letter was the chapter where I really felt "This is a man writing about women" - the main female character Ludmilla is written as this mysterious, almost elusive being who the main character is trying to catch in a sense, catch up to her reading (he talks about how she's read so much and is always ahead of him), catch her in real life as he keeps trying to meet with her (and sometimes failing or finding someone else instead)
- a funny bit about a female reader strapped to a chair reading a computer's output, with wires attached to her temples to measure her attention to the test - to determine if the computer's output is viable for market - funny b/c I just recently read about Clarkesworld closing reader short story submissions due to getting way too much AI generated works (which are not even good)
- ch 7 - consummation - author has been weaving the parallel of the erotic and reading for the entire book but here it is on clear display - what I find really interesting is the paragraph about the two "reading" each other, and then the man worries that he's essentially being objectified by Ludmilla or is just a substitute for her fantasies ("you being to harbor a doubt: that she is not reading you, single and whole as you are, but using you, using fragments of you detached from the context to constructfor herself a ghostly partner, known to her alone, in the penumbra of her semiconsciousness, and what she is deciphering is this apocryphal visitor, not you") - kind of a turnaround in that Ludmilla becomes a character with her own desires/inner thoughts/fantasies that the man isn't privy to, making it less of a conquest of her
This is a highly experimental and densely-written novel about two readers starting to read a book only to find the rest of the story missing and go in search of the rest. The chapters alternate between the main thread (a second person POV of the two readers) and the various stories they encounter (always the beginning of a new novel, each one truncated so we never get to its end).
Second person perspective is already something that's rarely seen in stories because of the kind of awkwardness of the reader's self-insertion into the story, but Calvino has made it work extremely effectively here. We are the reader in the first chapter, being called out ("Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered" is particularly relevant to me).
The named chapters which are the stories are interesting though some I enjoyed more than others. I guess my main gripe with these is that when reading a novel, I generally expect to follow a main plotline, and these chapters are like little diversions that end up going nowhere as none of the stories continue in the next named chapter. So there was this sense of starting and stopping, which broke down the flow of the narrative for me.
There are some great nuggets that Calvino inserts into these stories that link it back to the main themes - "Perhaps it is this story that is a bridge over the void, and as it advances it flings forward news and sensations and emotions to create a ground of upsets both collective and individual in the midst of which a path can be opened while we remain in the dark about many circumstances both historical and geographical" (from "Without fear of wind or vertigo").
.
.
Notes & Spoilers up to Chapter 7 (the named chapter, which is really chapter 14 overall)!!
.
.
.
Spoiler
- ch 5 on publishing houses: "it would seem that those who use books to produce other books are increasing more than those who just like to read books" - true of publishing houses now, eg. books in a series (I recall a rumour that The Hunger Games was supposed to be a standalone but the publisher asked the author to extend it into a trilogy?) - and look at all the new trilogies that follow previous trilogies years later
- I feel like Ludmilla's monologue here about wanting to stay on one side of the "boundary line" of readers and book producers(writers, etc) is curious - "I want to remain one of those who read them, so I take care always to remain on my side of the line. Otherwise, the unsullied pleasure of reading gends, or at least is transformed into something else, which is not what I want. This boundary line is tentative, it tends to get erased"
- "Looks down in the gathering shadow" - narrator has stories upon stories that haven't yet ended, yet he keeps running to create a new story(new life) - basically like the You of the book- except he wants to escape the story into a new one, not seeking out the ending of the story - "It's a story that sooner or later I'll also end up telling, but in the midst of all the others, not giving more importance to one than to another, not putting any special passion into it beyond the pleasure of narrating and remembering" - like reading books/stories for the pleasure, even as you lose track of the countless stories you've read, many of which may be similar in formula - crocodiles, another reptile - serpents in the prev story
- also what's interesting so far - all the story parts are in first person narration, with the protagonist telling you sometimes about the narrative tricks they(the author? in the very first story at the train station, it suggests the 'I' is really a proxy for the author) they are employing
- incredibly imaginative - Father of Stories, an old Indian man who is blind and illiterate, who recites stories word for word that are unpublished, about times and places he cannot possibly know about - a bit of mystery on the Author - the Indian man as "universal source of narrative material"
- translator Marana's letter regarding Flannery's book that he has the beginning of which, which can be completed easily by computers "programmed as they are to develop all the elements of a text with perfect fidelity to the stylistic and conceptual models of the author" - AI! - funny b/c I've been having a lot of conversations with people on AI art & text generators, this boook was published in 1979
- Marana's plane gets hijacked! they are targeting his manuscript (beginning of Flannery's novel) - they are a secret group dedicated to worship of secret books (sounds like a group I'd wanna join tbh)
- Marana & the Sultana - his idea to appease her is to insert a new novel right at the climax of the previous, eg. a character from the first novel starts reading a book which is the second novel & so on... very Arabian Nights (especially since they are in Arabia - Sultan & Sultana) - "a trap-novel designed by the treacherous translator with beginnings of novels that remain suspended"
- HIS PROSE IS SO GOOD - pg 123 a woman on a beach "placing between her person and the beams of the dog days' sun the brief shield of a popular New York magazine"
- what about the women? Women in each story show up but main character is always male - Ms Zwida, the women in Marana's letters who are readers, Bernadette the accomplice - this chapter on Marana's letter was the chapter where I really felt "This is a man writing about women" - the main female character Ludmilla is written as this mysterious, almost elusive being who the main character is trying to catch in a sense, catch up to her reading (he talks about how she's read so much and is always ahead of him), catch her in real life as he keeps trying to meet with her (and sometimes failing or finding someone else instead)
- a funny bit about a female reader strapped to a chair reading a computer's output, with wires attached to her temples to measure her attention to the test - to determine if the computer's output is viable for market - funny b/c I just recently read about Clarkesworld closing reader short story submissions due to getting way too much AI generated works (which are not even good)
- ch 7 - consummation - author has been weaving the parallel of the erotic and reading for the entire book but here it is on clear display - what I find really interesting is the paragraph about the two "reading" each other, and then the man worries that he's essentially being objectified by Ludmilla or is just a substitute for her fantasies ("you being to harbor a doubt: that she is not reading you, single and whole as you are, but using you, using fragments of you detached from the context to constructfor herself a ghostly partner, known to her alone, in the penumbra of her semiconsciousness, and what she is deciphering is this apocryphal visitor, not you") - kind of a turnaround in that Ludmilla becomes a character with her own desires/inner thoughts/fantasies that the man isn't privy to, making it less of a conquest of her