If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino (Review)
When friends and acquaintances saw me reading If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, it often led to people asking “what is the book about?” The answer to this question is far more difficult compared to most books.
The Christian Science Monitor called Italo Calvino’s book “a sly literary puzzle masquerading as a novel.” The NY Times called the book “a fantasy [that] fabricates a pair of dream-readers out of an engulfing nostalgia for the old modes of reading, for the pursuit of story and suspense, for the innocence which knows nothing of how books are made and unmade.” Wikipedia calls If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler a “postmodernist narrative…about the reader trying to read a book called If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.
As suggested in Wikipedia, Calvino wrote If on a Winter’s Night in second-person, and the book contains numerous beginnings to stories that never end. The result is not a plot or process that allows for easy explanation, but I resorted to calling Calvino’s book an ode to reading for there is love for the process of reading that is clear from start to finish. Calvino opened his book with the line, “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Let the world around you fade.” There was too much to unpack in the book to truly relax, but one cannot help but let the world fade and think about what it means to be a reader.
Since I did not have fellow readers to discuss Calvino’s books, I recorded some of the ideas and themes that stuck with me and kept me thinking well after I put down the book. The observations include:
The description in chapter 2 of reading a book concurrently with another person and the description of that power, was very well stated: “There, you have set it. What is more natural than a solidarity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book?” As suggested above, I longed for this connectivity as I read Calvino’s book.
Chapter 4 had war, riots, a death sentence for the protagonist, and seduction by the second protagonist to save the first. It ended abruptly, which led to this exchange in Chapter 5: “‘Excuse me, I was looking for the other pages, the rest,’ you say. ‘The rest?...Oh there’s enough material here to discuss for a month. Aren’t you satisfied?’ ‘I didn’t mean to discuss; I wanted to read...’” This longing for what’s to come seems interesting when treated as an allegory for life. Finding out what happens next puts you all the closer to the end—to death. Depending on how you view death, longing for what is to come is either an occasion for anticipation or dread.
The protagonist fears—after viewing all the unfinished manuscripts—that he “lost the 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.” As a writer of columns, I cannot help but tinker with the words. Sometimes after publication, I will break out my work for another purpose and make refinements. The writing may be final in some regards more so for the reader than the writer. Prior to reading Calvino’s book, I had not thought about authorship in this way.
Later in the book, the writer discusses the process of writing and his desire that Ludmilla reads the words he writes as he writes them. He then notes, “Readers are my vampires. I feel a throng of readers looking over my shoulder and seizing the words as they are set down on paper.” It is an interesting consideration to think about how readers affect the writing of writers. Calvino continues exploring this during a sequence in which one writer produces popular novels and he is writing next to an author who produces great works with minor readership. Both writers have a longing for what the other writer produces.
Irnerio, one of the minor characters, does not read books, but he turns them into sculptures. “I don’t mind watching her [Ludmilla] read...And besides, somebody has to read books, right?” At least I can rest easy; I won’t have to read them myself.” What does this sequence say about readers and non-readers? I encounter far more people who openly admit to being non-readers, and I wonder how this alters the connections between people. There is commonality people share in TV, film, and podcasts, but we are in an era that includes less readership than was once the norm. While it is easy for me to lament this as a reader, most people—like Irnerio in the book—are perfectly content not having to read.
One excerpt captured my feelings on the entire book: “...reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing. If we assume writing manages to go beyond the limitations of the author, it will continue to have a meaning only when it is read by a single person and pass through his mental circuits. Only the ability to be read by a given individual proves that what is written shared in the power of writing, a power based on something that goes behind the individual.” This is a fascinating statement given the story’s continuous goal for the reader to share a book with Ludmilla. It is an ironic statement given that I longed to share this book with someone else for discussion.
Another great line went as follows: “On the contrary, I am forced to stop reading just when they [the books] become most gripping. I can’t wait to resume, but when I think I am reopening the book I began, I find a completely different book before me...” This section highlights how much the experiences of the reader—and even the writer—find their experience with the book altered by what they experience in real life. Later in the book, Calvino looks at the way a reader changes and notes how much a second reading of the same book may elicit vastly different thoughts and emotions simply because the reader is different from whom he or she was when first reading the book.
Censorship it is a significant theme in the latter part of the book. One thought is how this idea of not being able to read the same books relates to the ideas of the language in 1984. If people cannot share the same books, then they similarly cannot share and discuss the ideas within those books.
I thoroughly enjoyed If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and give it the most enthusiastic four-star rating that I can. The reason for withholding the final star relates to the time and place of my reading as much as the book itself—perhaps fitting given the book’s theme. I read Italo Calvini’s book on my own and for my own enjoyment, but it really is a book that is ideal for discussion in a classroom or a book club.
I found myself longing for discussion given the unique nature of the book, but I was left with taking notes and wrestling with the ideas myself. Normally, this is fine as an introvert who loves to read. Yet some books—Brothers Karamazov and Ulysses are two others—leave me longing for my English literature classes to hear the thoughts and feelings of others who have read the same content. Still, I recommend the book for anyone who loves books and loves to read. But I will encourage readers who are considering this book to seek out others to share the experience.
