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

The region it describes, he learns, belonged to an independent nation called Cimmeria, which existed in the interwar period, but the young state was erased from the map in the in the territorial grabs between its two powerful neighbors. The Reader consults his atlas and encyclopedia. The names of places in it, oddly, aren’t Polish, at all. 2,by Bazakbal, he observes it has nothing in common with book No. So, he decides to pick up a copy of a brand-new book from a pile.īut when he begins to read book No. It dawns on him then that the book he was reading isn’t the one he thought it was –the one by Calvino - but a Polish novel. He’s told, “Through an error of the bindery, the signatures of that book became mixed with those of another new publication, the Polish novel, “Outside the town of Malbork,” by Tazio Bazakbal. The Reader realizes he’s got a defective copy, which has, in essence, 30-odd pages, and the rest of it, repetitions of the same. The plot breaks off on a cliffhanger, due to a “printer’s mistake”. Its titular story is about a man who arrives at railway station, where he’s to hand over a Samsonite-like piece of luggage to a stranger. It begins: “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Its protagonist is the Reader, the person who’s both reading the book and the one being read. The two sets are connected: each numbered chapter tells the story of how the reader arrives at the next book, and has baked into it, a clever trigger each book, in turn, exudes a whiff of what’s to follow. Those are crosshatched with a parallel novel, divided into a dozen numbered chapters. As in the Christopher Nolan-directed movie, Inception (2010), where the honcho of an energy conglomerate is transported into a many-leveled dream, so in this book, the reader is forced to hop from one book to the next. If it’s hard to follow it, it’s because of design, which is challenging, yes, but also distinct and delicious.īy the time I made it to the end, I’d read a collection of ten novels, all incomplete, all left on a note of great suspense. This is not the kind of book one reads on a train because reading it makes one feel they’re in an illusory realm, where time decelerates and the hands of the clock move too slowly.

At another level, it’s like that of standing in front of a funhouse mirror that distorts tomes, and tosses out all the rules and conventions of a novel.

The sensation of reading it is like that of being in a bright dream, in which one awakens from a dream, when in reality, the dreamer continues to sleep. Everything about If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, published in 1979 - from its dust jacket to its spine to its pages, lined with print - attests to its being a novel.

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