If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

The first book I received was horribly misprinted - chapters intermingled with chapters from other novels, all incomplete. Repeated inquiries to the publisher sent me on nothing but a wild goose chase lasting the duration of my engagement. Not worth the time.

I was prompted to start reading Italo Calvino’s novels after coming across an article in Foreign Policy magazine “The Land of Topless Minarets and Headless Little Girls” by a pseudonymed writer Amal Hanano who turned out to be Lina Sergie Attar, a Syrian refugee and activist who lives in Chicago and writes often and emotively about the end of Aleppo. In that her most famous piece, Attar uses an Italo Calvino novel “Invisible Cities” – in which the protagonist Marco Polo describes various cities he has visited to Emperor Kublai Khan until the Mongol finally realizes he’s in fact hearing about the same city over and over again from different angles – as an allegory to show the different sides to the destruction of Aleppo, her home.

Good writers need to read – we often gain inspiration from books we’ve encountered and ways of telling tales that strike a chord in our consciousness as we also hone our own craft; making us at once more ourselves but also more them too. For this reason I enthusiastically picked up a copy of Calvino’s “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler…” (working my way as I am toward “Invisible Cities”).

This novel is the story of readers – two readers specifically; written in second person one of the readers is ‘you’ and the other is a girl who the narrator seeks to love. It is also the story of writers, one legitimate novelist and his nemesis, a fraud who is pawning ‘apocryphal books’ using the famous author’s name and stealing and misplacing titles and translations in a grand conspiracy that eventually reaches back to the girl; as all good stories do. Through the story the protagonist continues to find unfinished books (the first chapters of which are written into the novel, showing Calvino’s versatility) – to be dragged into their stories only to be abandoned as the books are inexplicably truncated. In his increasingly desperate search to find the reason for the fragmentary novels and the villain responsible, you as a reader who are also a character in the story are inescapably captured.

“If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler…” is not a normal book as Calvino is not a normal novelist. If you are expecting a story which requires no thought, a trip where the ending is already known, you might find this book frustrating. But if you are a reader – like Lina Sergie Attar is a reader – you will find yourself in Calvino’s prose – and you might even find an answer or two.

I cannot, unfortunately, claim more than a basic knowledge of the work of Italo Calvino. Before reading _Invisible Cities_ (1972) a couple of years ago, I knew that he was a highly imaginative and transgressive author often associated with writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and (perhaps more appropriately) Julio Cortázar. Like the former, Calvino speculated with metaphysics; like the latter, he was fond of literary games. Now, _Invisible Cities_ is quite simply one of the most beautiful books I've ever read, but for some reason I kept postponing the reading of _If on a winter's night a traveler_ (1979), mainly because its premise did not sound that appealing to me. Now that I have read it, I can confirm that sometimes books are greater than their premises. Once again, the "how" is more important than the "what."

_If on a winter's night a traveler_ (a perplexing title if there ever was one) is a novel composed of the opening pages of ten different novels, interspersed with the story of two readers, a man and a woman. The novels within the novel are never concluded, so the story of the two readers gives unity to a text that would otherwise simply be a collection of first chapters. If asked what Calvino's novel is about, I would say that in terms of subject it is about the adventure of reading. In terms of plot, it is about two people who want to read a book but end up reading the openings of ten different books instead. As if this weren't interesting enough, the main character, referred to as the Reader, is actually the reader of Calvino's novel, as the narrator addresses this Reader in the second person throughout the novel. The female character, named Ludmilla, is generally referred to as the Other Reader.

The (incomplete) novels within the novel are varied in subject, tone, genre, and approach. One of them is an erotic novel with a Japanese theme; another is concerned with a revolution. There's a story about a man who is obsessed with mirror images, and Mexican tale of fate, ghosts, inheritance, and revenge. Another novel is a noir narrative about a man and a woman who are trying to get rid of a corpse. The Reader does not encounter all of the novels as physical texts. One of them, written in the form of a diary, is read to the reader by a professor who translates it as he goes. The Reader gets into the story each time, but then, when he wants to continue reading it, there is always a problem: pages are blank, the novel happens to be unfinished, etc. The title of the novel, an unfinished sentence, points to the characters' inability to finish reading the books they encounter.

_If on a winter's night a traveler_ mixes genres not only by incorporating several different narratives into one. The story of the two readers, the main thread of the novel, is also an amalgam: a love story, but also a mystery. As readers, we want to find out whether the two readers end up together, but we also want to know what is going on with the unfinished books. Clues are offered throughout the novel. We read, for instance, that "all books continue in the beyond" (71), and that "reading is going towards something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be" (72). In one of the novels (number 5) the narrator says, "I'm producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell [...], a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first" (109). Calvino's implication is that books never truly conclude; finishing a book is only the beginning of the adventure of reading, which leads from something perceptible (the book as object, pages, words, letters) to something intangible (a story, thoughts, ideas, etc.). Reading, in addition, is not limited to the perusal of a text. At one point, the Reader goes to Ludmilla's house, and by exploring it, learns about Ludmilla: he is reading the house (an idea that Gaston Bachelard develops in _The Poetics of Space_). A person's body may also be read: "Lovers' reading of each other's bodies [...] differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages" (156), etc.

In addition to the two readers, two other important characters appears: the Irish writer Silas Flannery, and Ermes Marana, who dreams of a literature made of apocrypha, false attributions, and pastiches (159). In other words, the Author and the Fraud. (The figure of Ermes Marana, incidentally, makes me think of Argentinean author Ricardo Piglia, who explored, among other things, plagiarism as an art form.) The Author has the opposite problem of the Reader: he reads many different books, but they all seem to be one individual book to him. At one point, the Author considers writing a novel that is composed of the beginnings of ten different novels that do not conclude. Within Calvino's novel, in other words, a character describes Calvino's novel. The mise-en-abyme technique recalls André Gide's _The Counterfeiters_ (1925), in which one of the characters considers writing the novel _The Counterfeiters_.

As you can probably tell from this review, _If on a winter's night a traveler_ is not a "neat" novel. Due to the nature of its premise, the novel is, in a sense, all over the place, and this may put some readers off. In general, we like our stories to end, and Calvino forces us to challenge this inclination. A relatively recent literary event seems to suggest that we as readers will continue to "read for the ending." In 2004, David Mitchell published _Cloud Atlas_, a novel that is in fact a series of thematically interlinked novellas. Mitchell gave credit to Calvino for the idea, but he made a major alteration: his stories stop in the middle of the narrative, but each one of them is concluded later, in order. The result is fantastic. _Cloud Atlas_ conveys a sense of neatness and even perfection that is not present in _If on a winter's night a traveler_, which is often (appropriately) random. I'm not saying Mitchell improved Calvino; the two books have entirely different purposes. I'm simply pointing out to our prejudices as readers. I myself try to not "spoil" books for those who read my reviews. As if the ending were all that mattered.

Like Calvino's novel, this review could continue to branch into numerous reflections (I did not even mention the Nouveau Roman), but I feel I've written enough, so I'll stop here. _If on a winter's night a traveler_ is a fascinating meditation on what it means to read and to write, a book about the nature of books. If books are your life, as they are mine, you'll love this one.

My next book by Calvino will by either _Cosmicomics_ or _t-zero_.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy the book!

2.5 stars
If On A Winter’s Night, A Traveller… is the 3rd stand-alone novel by Italian author, Italo Calvino. It is translated from Italian by William Weaver. The format is somewhat unusual: the chapters are addressed to the Reader (=you), written in the second person. These are interspersed with opening chapters from books the Reader is reading, or tries to read. Frustrated by printing errors, the Reader returns to the book shop to complain, where he is joined by the Other Reader (Ludmilla).

The fragments of the various books are vaguely interesting, but not as compelling as they apparently are to the Reader and the Other Reader, intent on finding the original titles and completing their reads. Some pieces are so dense, so tortuous (or is that torturing?) that the reader’s eyes (mine) glaze over. The stories feature espionage, leaving the farm, prison escape, revolutionaries (x2), murder, ringing telephone paranoia, mirrors as means of deceit, Japanese seduction, erasure and a duel.

The chapters featuring the Readers’ quest presents philosophy on the experience of books and reading from different perspectives: the reader, the translator, students of literature, publishers, authors, analysts of books and censors. The Reader is difficult to identify with, and must be starved for literature to be so enthralled by these fragments. It’s a mercifully short read that will at least give the reader an idea if they want more of Italo Calvino, or not.

An experimental novel. The main character is a reader who can’t finish a book because the print copies are mixed up and he ends up reading first chapters of various novels over and over again. He meets up with a woman who has the same problem and he goes on a search to find the rest of the book for both of them. Actually there are two women, sisters, who have different ideas about books and what the purpose of reading is. They appear in different guises throughout the story. The narrative is labyrinth-like, as if Borges had written it.

But it’s not fair to really focus on the “plot.” Like many of Calvino’s works, this is more a work of philosophy than a novel. And, like all of Calvino’s work, there’s a heavy dose of fantasy and absurdity. There’s a professor of “Cimmerian literature and Bothno-Ugaric languages” which sounded so realistic I looked them up to be sure they weren’t real!

The book is made up of ten stories; think of them as chapters. A recurring theme is messages that he sees around him. It’s focused on how we relate to books. “Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.” There is discussion of “someone who has learned not to read.” He touches on issues with translated books. There’s a chapter on ways of reading a book. While reading, “something must always remain that eludes us,” which, of course, has often been said of poetry.

I enjoyed his digs at deconstruction and the French scholars, such as this passage referring to a conference: “…during the reading there must be some who underline the reflections of production methods, others the process of reification, others the sublimation of repression, others the sexual semantic codes, others the metalanguages of the body, others the transgressions of roles, in politics and in private life.”

This I thought was apropos given current concerns about “fake news:”

“We’re in a country where everything that can be falsified has been falsified: paintings in museums, gold ingots, bus tickets. The counterrevolution and the revolution fight with salvos of falsification: the result is that no one can be sure what is true and what is false, the political police simulate revolutionary actions and the revolutionaries disguise themselves as policemen.”

I have liked other works by Calvino (Invisible Cities; The Watcher, short stories) but this one just didn’t do it for me. I was lost at times in the narrative and had to re-read to figure out what was going on, and at times didn’t seem worth all the effort. But many passages had great insight.

This is a difficult book to describe. At the plot level, it is about a reader who starts reading a novel, only to find that at a crucial moment the story in the book he is holding ends, and another story--apparently pages from a completely different novel--begins. And this happens over and over again. In the meantime, he develops a relationship with another reader of the same multiply-truncated novel, and via that relationship encounters a cast of other characters, all of whom deepen the mystery of what initially seemed like a simple printer's error. But that's only at one level. More fundamentally, the novel is about the experience of reading the novel--this novel in particular, but also novels in general. In other words, the reader (you, me) is the protagonist, just as in the novel's plot the Reader is the protagonist. The boundary (if there is one) between the two levels of the book is always blurry, and is sometimes eliminated entirely when the reader is injected into the stories-in-progress within the book.

Get it? As a subjective being you are in, and then out of, the narrative, and the transition is often seamless.

The book is simultaneously playful and serious. I think. That is, I know it's playful, and I think it's serious. Calvino grapples with a difficult question: What is reading? What does it mean to take into your consciousness something that has been created by someone else, but with enough room left in it for your active participation via the act of reading? He also raises questions about the relationship of trust between reader and author. In almost every case, the reader is no more likely to ever see the (real) author than he is to see the (fictional) characters in one of that author's novels. Calvino explores these ideas thoughtfully--see, for example, page 72, which describes what the book is about (I think, though I'm not sure about any of this).

At one point, the Reader (is it you?) captures both the appeal and the dilemma of the book (this book, any book). "The romantic fascination produced in the pure state by the first sentences of the first chapter of many novels is soon lost in the continuation of the story . . . . I would like to be able to write a book that is only an incipit, that maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning, the expectation still not focused on an object." (p. 177) What reader does not know this feeling? Part of it is the excitement of starting a new book--all the possibilities, none of which is yet clear as the path down which the author will take you. But then, precisely because beginnings are so fraught with possibilities, the more you read the more of those possibilities are closed, cut off from any further exploration, and you can begin to feel that you are getting bogged down--a feeling that becomes a yearning for another beginning, which will only come when you either finish the book you are reading (that you are bogged down in) or abandon it and start another. And that series of unfulfilled beginnings is precisely what we are treated to in Calvino's novel, which is concerned with both the dilemma of reading and the impossibility of telling a complete story.

All of this is interesting enough, and at times Calvino prompts a real rethinking of the reader's assumptions about novels. But then we get to the end. I suppose he felt that he had to somehow make an ending from all the beginnings he had introduced, but the way he did it was too self-referential and smugly clever for my tastes. Maybe that only reinforces his point--that beginnings are where the power and appeal of stories lies, while endings are simply what's left after all other possible doors have been shut. This is one of the most interesting things I've read about what it means to read and write stories. But as a story TO read, it was only so-so.

I knew approximately two things about Italo Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler" before actually reading the book. First, it was considered an extraordinary piece of modern literature. Second, it was a story-within-a-story-within-a-story. Neither of these pieces of information were able to adequately prepare me for the experience of reading said novel, and, days after I finished it, I'm still a bit flummoxed about the entire experience.

The book begins with you, the Reader, buying Italo Calvino's latest novel, titled "If on a winter's night a traveler". You take it home and read it, and are invested in the story. The first chapter is there, and you are wondering what will happen next when you turn to chapter two, only to find that it is a repeat of chapter one. In fact, the entire book is a repeat of chapter one. So, the next day, you take the book back to the store and explain to the clerk what happened. While there, you meet a woman, the Other Reader, who had the same problem with her copy. You find out that the book you were reading was accidentally mixed up with a book called "Outside the town of Malbork" and you were actually reading that book instead. Anxious to pick up the story, you buy a copy of this other novel and take it home to read it. Unfortunately, the book you are now reading is in no way related to the book you were reading. The characters, setting, and storyline are entirely different.

This is the basis of the book - as the Reader and Other Reader attempt to find the next part of the book they are reading, they discover that it is either missing, is really a different work, is a mistranslation of a plagiarized work, etc. The chapters alternate between the books the readers are reading and what is happening to them as the action unfolds.

It sounds like a brilliant way to tell a story, and, initially, I was engrossed. However, around the seventh book, I began to get a bit lost with what was going on with the readers. Calvino has a tendency to refer to his characters in the second person, and explains why they aren't in the first person, and tends to switch whether the "you" of the story is the Reader (male) or the Other Reader (female). At one point, a secret plagiarism group bent on mistranslation and discovering what is truth in literature makes an entrance, and that's where I really got confused. I finished the book, enjoying the snippets of stories inside, but was lost as to what was happening to the Reader and Other Reader.

This is definitely a thinking person's book, and while I'm glad I read it, my brain is still a little sore. While this isn't a bad thing, it's certainly something to keep in mind while reading.

During an otherwise-pointless summer I once spent in Somerville, MA, I made the acquaintance of this book & author through a rather-pleasant personal acquaintance (he also introduced me to Stanislaw Lem, William Gibson, and taking "Wired" magazine seriously -- hey, it was 1993, okay?), who liked it so much he spontaneously read the opening few paragraphs to me, for the sheer pleasure of it, just to get me contagiously "hooked."

And, indeed, "hooked" I was. (Although it took 'till the end of the summer and the impending bus ride back home to justify picking up my OWN copy, this new-to-me Calvino title was just the ticket: a perfect "traveler's companion.")

Coming back to it years later, I was struck by how prescient Calvino's opening "voicings" of the problem-sets of Modern Day readers are: not only are you TOLD "you're about to begin reading" the new Italo Calvino novel, you're ADVISED you might have trouble doing so, considering all the white-noise/mind-static emanating from, in all likelihood, the television watched by others in the next room over.

The artifice of novels-within-the-novels never becomes tiring (Calvino's reasons for, once again, spurning the reader/second-person-narrator in continuing the LAST novel-within-novel begun are never redundant, and satisfyingly semi-plausible); the "drawing together" of two people sheds further enlightenment on the need for "median spaces," novels or no, for autonomous individuals to meet "betwixt and between"; and, further, the survey of Modern-to-Classic Novel Styles deployed in the series of started-and-abandoned tales-within-tales not only revives one's potentially-dormant interest(s) in Our Forbears but CLEARLY draws on such disparate "filterings-in" as have taken root in spy/noir cinema, political writings on the level of Pynchon, DeLillo, and le Carré, and the more abstract formalists such as William Burroughs and Alain Robbe-Grillet ... ALL THE WHILE, managing to read like a carnivalesque ride-on-the-ferris-wheel!

Some books presume you're smarter than you are (or, at least, perhaps might be) -- and, by reading them, lift you up to that level.

This is one of those.

Calling this book a novel would be like calling the first issue of Mad a comic book; yes, it looked like a comic book, but it was a meta-comment on the entire world in which I lived, and it introduced me to satire. This book looks like a novel, but it sure doesn't read like a novel, but rather as a book about novels, a book about books, a book about reading, all that and even more. It is as if Calvino is saying, to paraphrase Browning,

How do I read Thee?
Let me count the ways.

And count, delineate, describe, expostulate, exemplify, remonstrate, and demonstrate, among other things is what Calvino does in this course of this book. Often he does it for us, sometimes for himself, and sometimes it's the main character in the book, Reader, doing it for Other Reader. Make no mistake, these are not the only characters, but only two of a multitude which seem to multiply with each new chapter.
. . .
In this novel, Calvino deals with the problem of reading books which suddenly turn into other books through various artifices, such as a binding mistake, a process I was unfortunately familiar with. For me, at the time, the binding problem was only a disappointment and a puzzlement, but Calvino turns it into unmitigated fun. Be forewarned, if you love books, you will likely love this book. If you want seamless stories with neat, satisfying endings, like a pleasant ride on a white bay on a bridal path, you need read no further, this book is definitely not for you; it more resembles a wild mustang with you holding tight onto its reins heading down a mountainside, throwing you off about ten times, and stopping to let you climb back on each time to continue the ride.

Riding Calvino begins with instructions on how to read, written by Calvino.

[page 3] You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice -- they won't hear you otherwise -- "I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!"

. . . Keeping in mind the readers who want the happy ending, Calvino has Reader marry Ludmilla and the two of them are in a big bed reading. Ludmilla closes her book and turns off her light to go to sleep, asking, "Aren't you tired of reading?" and Reader answers, "Just a moment, I've almost finished If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino." You have read the beginning and end of my review and this novel; to read all the stuff in the middle of my review, see DIGESTWORLD ISSUE#129 by Bobby Matherne

Perhaps this is a brilliant story. I will never know. I was only able to get through one and half chapters. Mr. Calvino has targeted a very specific, or even special reader, but it certainly was not me.

If I understood correctly, with this book Calvino tried to write off an almost enduringly writers block. To do this, he takes us on a strange, dizzying voyage making clear that reading and writing are very complex things. Calvino presents us a dozen of short stories, all unfinished, and leaving the reader very unsatisfied. In between, he talkes to us, the readers, and introduces us into his story, and by doing so strengthening the sense of disorientation we already had.
Postmodernism was trendy, back in the 70s and 80s, and Calvino clearly presents his own version of it, making clear the unconscious dimensions of reading and writing, in the world of books and literature, but also in life itself. That's quite something, and some stories are really beautifully written, and especially in the 8the chapter a few leads come together.
But, to be honest, I wasn't impressed. It's all too artificial and effusive to my taste (as quite a lot of Italian novels, I'm afraid). Calvino has been too ambitious, in my opinion. To stay with postmodernism, I rather prefer 'In the name of the rose' by Umberto Eco, from around the same periode, and covering almost the same subject but in a much more elegant way. Sorry, Italo.

One definition of metafiction is "Fiction that deals, often playfully and self-referentially, with the writing of fiction or its conventions." That could pretty much describe Italo Calvino's "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler," a gloriously surreal story about the hunt for a mysterious book.

A reader opens Italo Calvino's latest novel, "If On A Winter's Night A Traveller," only to have the story cut short. Turns out it was a defective copy, with another book's pages inside. But as the reader tries to find out what book the defective pages belong to, he keeps running into even more books and more difficulties -- as well as the beautiful Ludmilla, a fellow reader who also received a defective book.

With Ludmilla assisting him (and, he hopes, going to date him), the reader then explores obscure dead languages, publishers' shops, bizarre translators and various other obstacles. All he wants is to read an intriguing book. But he keeps stumbling into tales of murder and sorrow, annoying professors, and the occasional radical feminist -- and a strange literary conspiracy. Will he ever finish the book?

In its own way, "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler" is a mystery story, a satire, a romance, and a treasure hunt. Any book whose first chapter explains how you're supposed to read it has got to be a winner -- "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, "If On A Winter's Night a Traveler." Relax. Concentrate." And so on, with Calvino gently joking and chiding the reader before actually beginning his strange little tale.

As cute as that first chapter is, it also sets the tone for this strange, funny metafictional tale, which not only inserts Calvino but the reader. That's right -- this book is written in the second person, with the reader as the main character. "You did this" and "you did that," and so on. Only a few authors are brave enough to insert the reader... especially in a novel about a novel that contains other novels. It seems like a subtle undermining of reality itself.

It's a bit disorienting when Calvino inserts chapters from the various books that "you" unearth -- including ghosts, hidden identities, Mexican duels, Japanese erotica, and others written in the required styles. Including some cultures that he made up. Upon further reading, those isolated chapters reveal themselves to be almost as intriguing as the literary hunt. Especially since each one cuts off at the most suspenseful moment -- what happens next? Nobody knows!

It all sounds hideously confusing, but Calvino's deft touch and sense of humor keep it from getting too weird. There are moments of wink-nudge comedy, as well as the occasional poke at the publishing industry. But Calvino also provides chilling moments, mildly sexy ones, and a tone of mystery hangs over the whole novel.

At times it feels like Calvino is in charge of "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler"... and at other times, it feels like "you" are the one at the wheel. Just don't put this in the stack of Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First. Pure literary genius.

I am extremely angry at the store for their two-paragraph review in which THE ENDING IS REVEALED IN THE REVIEW'S SECOND SENTENCE. How can they be so stupid. I am a few chapters into the book and find it fabulous. I went to the store to buy it for a friend, and up pops the key piece of information that removes a significant piece of the suspense and wonder of the reading experience. Why couldn't they have written SPOILER ALERT?

Calvino always entertains as he confounds. His career consisted of reaching into new territory, digging up new ways of telling tales, and of mirroring these tales to life and existence as we humans experience it. Calvino stands as a pioneer of storytelling. He tells new and fresh stories in an age when the story spicket seems to churn out redundancies or mere variations on themes. "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler" is one of Calvino's true masterpieces and an examplar of how he dug up these new forms and ways of storytelling.

First off, you (yes YOU!) are a character in this novel. You are directly referred to in the second person and called "Reader". The first section discusses how you approach reading and how you approach the subject of books in general. Both reading and books apparently obsess you, according to the text, and this obsession (your obsession) drives most of the novel's bizarre plot. Unfortunately, your obsession and your need for resolution gets foiled at almost every turn. Bad printing, unfinished stories, novels cut into pieces and distributed, deconstruction, stolen manuscripts, forgeries, arrests or fake arrests, revolutionary groups, censorship. Throughout the novel, all of these aggravate your need for a good story with a good ending. Resolution seems a far off dream in the face of a world that, beyond your control, keeps you from your desires. Each novel you find (you find ten of them in Calvino's book) terminates suddenly at a moment of excessive suspense. How do these stories end? Who knows? Enter the obsession. Along the way you meet another reader (referred to as "Other Reader") who you fancy and who then joins you on your quest to find the remainder of the unfinished stories. Will you end up in bed together?

You navigate many familiar and strange locales in your obsessive hunt: a book shop, the Department of Bothno-Ugaric Languages, a rather ornery and opiniated literary study group, a nervous publisher's office, a revolutionary translator's letters, the Other Reader's perspective, the Other Reader's apartment, the letters of a famous but frustrated author, a taxi - or a fake taxi, a prison - or a fake prison, a room containing a machine that analyzes novels, the Director General of Ircania's office - where you hear about brilliant censorship schemes, and finally, to a library. But you find yourself far away from your beloved Other Reader. Your obsession has sent you packing away, entangled you in bizarre governmental and revolutionary activities, and now you need to wake up. Hopefully you do. Do you?

"If On A Winter's Night A Traveler" contains too much juicy material to summarize. But it's disturbing in places, laugh out loud funny in others, heartbreakingly poetic in still others. It's far easier to experience than to explain. What it will do is make you think about reading and why people read, and then about stories, their construction, and why people write, and then about resolution, then about people, then about society, government, technology, translations, ideologies, connections, disconnections, love, beginnings, endings, and existence in general. It may help you to realize what is important in life, and, despite our need for resolution and our frustrated groping for unanswerable questions in the face of many forces we can't possibly control, we still manage to find anchors to help us through it all. After all, do all stories need a beginning and an end? You'll think about that, too.

If you read just one book by Calvino, better make it this one. After all, you're the subject.

The protagonists of this extraordinarily beguiling and inventively written book are The Reader (a man, also called You) and The Other Reader (a woman, Ludmilla) both of whom are passionate book lovers. Their common bond leads them eventually to also become passionate about each other. Both discover that the book each is reading mistakenly contains unfinished novels by different authors. Due to an alleged publishing error each novel ends abruptly.
_If On A Winter's Night A Traveler_ is really about the love of reading--the special relationship a reader forms with books. Every reader brings what is in himself to the book he is reading: his expectations (who the author is, what is on the book jacket), his reading style (whether he devours every book written by the author or if he is more discerning in his tastes in literature), and the books he has read previously.
With wit, wisdom, and boundless imagination, Mr. Calvino brings You along on this magical journey, where paranoid plots abound to frustrate The Reader's and The Other Reader's intentions to finish the books into which they become so readily captivated. Included are a nefarious translator, possible alien beings who influence the Readers' minds while they are reading, and a censorship czar from a foreign dictatorship. All stand in the way of The Readers' finding satisfaction.
Ludmilla encourages The Reader to go to the book's publishing house, but she refuses to accompany him there. To her the world is divided between readers and the authors and publishers, and she must never cross that line. "Otherwise," Ludmilla goes on to say, "the unsullied pleasure of reading ends, or at least is transformed into something else, which is not what I want." The bottom line, and Mr. Calvino makes this abundantly clear, is that were there no readers, authors and the books that they write would cease to exist. Readers could live without authors, but without readers authors would fade from existence.

This brilliant, funny, ingenious, unusual and amazingly inventive novel is one of the finest to be written anywhere in the world since the war. On the first page we are introduced to an persistent, thorough, thoughtful person who is intelligent and ... attractive. That person is You. You are about to read Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. On the first page You are about to read and the narrator tells You how to sit down, how to adjust the light, make sure You have cigarettes nearby in case You smoke. You soon encounter Calvino's wonderful lists. (My favorite one is list of categories of Books, such as Books You Haven't Read, Books You Needn't Read; Books that if You Had more than One Life You would Certainly also Read But Unfortunately Your Days are Numbered; Books You Mean to Read But There are Others You Must Read First, and The Books that Everbody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them too.) You start reading If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, and You find it is the tale of intrigue in a railway station, but just as it gets interesting You find the first 16 pages have been reprinted over and over again. You go to the bookstore and you are given the correct novel, which is not in fact the Correct novel at all but an interesting tale of Polish village intrigue called "Outside the Town of Malbrok." And just as this book gets interesting you find that the pages have been all bound together. And You go and find Yourself going back to the bookstore and finding a new novel, different from the previous two novels and go on until You find there are ten separate opening chapters and the various foul-ups and printing errors and mistakes are all the result of a fiending conspiracy against literature. In the course of the novel You meet a wonderful woman named Ludmilla who You will eventually marry... And at the end You will find yourself at one of the best happy endings of all of literature with a perfect closing line. There is no excuse for not reading this book.

You have just begun reading a review of the book "If on a winter's night a traveler" by Italo Calvino.
You may have come in search of this book based on the recommendation of a trusted literate friend. He or she probably recommended it to you with the particular sort of secret glee anyone enjoys when suggesting a little-known book of the sort that is sure to change your mind about the act of reading itself by the time you finish it. Certainly, this book *will* accomplish that--this book is so special, it actually reads YOU--your habits of reading, your responses and impatiences. This book in fact personifies the secret glee of knowing something--and not the something the reader does not know, but the something the reader knows best: him- or herself.
Moreover, more remarkable first-rate novels have their beginning in this moderately-sized volume than in the entire careers of many fine novelists. This novel is a tour de force and a virtuoso's trick, an adventure in patience and a race for meaning. It all begins with a mysterious traveler in a station on a winter's night, but more importantly, it begins when *you* buy the book. From then on, it's a brilliant romp in second person through the world of books, with brilliant side trips into every major stylistic mode of the modern novel.
Maybe your literate friend failed to mention that Italo Calvino, the Italian novelist, was one of the finest literary minds this century in *any* country. Maybe your literate friend neglected the need to connect him with books more familiar to you--for exmaple, by mentioning that Umberto Eco, author of "The Name of the Rose", is a great admirer of Calvino. Maybe you had no literary friend to make suggestions at all and simply stumbled on this page by web-browsing. In that case, I am delighted to be your literate friend, and I maintain that secret glee in saying: None of it will begin until you...
Buy the book

When you read this book you are subjected to Italo Calvino mercilessly pelting you with a barrage of random ideas about reading/writing (its purpose; its enjoyment; its relationship to reality, truth, interpersonal relationships, sensuality, politics, etc., etc.). The plot, if you can call it such, consists of the first few pages of ten different novels strung together with an increasingly bizarre plot in which you (the Reader) and a female love interest (the Other Reader) are trying to find/finish these novels. The book as a whole is self-referential, fragmentary, and surreal; it goes from pretentious drivel through insightful observations and everything in between...and I enjoyed it in all its strangeness.

Often when I'm reading an extraordinarily well-written book, I marvel at how difficult and even agonizing the writing process must be; here's a book that makes me realize that this is a phase most readers go through and a challenge that confronts most writers. A charmer from the very first paragraph, "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" makes readers feel good about reading and writers feel good about writing.
Never have I read a book that communicates with and understands its reader so well. Writers like Nabokov and Pynchon like to have fun with their readers by posing literary puzzles, but here Calvino empathizes with the avid reader's feelings of frustration from interruptions, expectations, academic blathering, and personal efforts to reflect on literature.
The protagonist of this novel is none other than you yourself, the reader. The novel is about the protagonist's (i.e., your) attempt to finish reading the novel that you have started. However, problems keep cropping up, obstructing you from your goal: misprintings, mixups, interruptions, paramilitary operations, incarceration. Joining you in your quest is Ludmilla, a woman you met in the bookstore and whom you would like to date. Ludmilla has a sister, Lotaria, a feminist who thinks literature should be used to further her polemic agenda and represents the kind of "ideological cheerleading" for which critic Harold Bloom has so much disdain. Ludmilla, on the other hand, represents the perfect passive reader who reads for purely escapist purposes.
The novel's structure is entirely original and somewhat difficult to describe. It consists of two sets of alternating chapters; one set narrates your search for the missing remainder of the novel, and the other set consists of fragments of other novels you mistakenly pick up in your search. Each of these "other" novels is a brilliant piece of writing in its own right, each by a different fictitious author and with a distinctive plot and style. Just as you're becoming engrossed in whatever novel you're reading at a certain time, another interruption occurs, forcing you to resume your worldwide odyssey.

This may sound like a frustrating reading experience, but it's actually a lot of fun, as Calvino demonstrates that starting a new "novel" saves an old plot thread from wearing out. And just when things seem to start spinning out of control for the hapless protagonist (i.e., you, remember?), Calvino brings it all together in a narrative masterstroke that summarizes what all fiction is really about, which hasn't changed much since ancient times: it is simply about telling a story that hasn't happened in real life.

"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. "
So begins the journey into the labyrinthine story — stories really — that the Italian author has prepared for his reader in “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.”
The novel begins with "you," "the reader," settling down to read the book. However, just as the story gets good, the reader finds he has a defective book that provides only the first few pages of novel.
And thus begins the reader's quest for the rest of the tale, in which he soon enlists a woman, known as the "Other Reader."
Each time the reader thinks he's found the rest of the tale, he's actually discovered an entirely different work of fiction, as incomplete as the first.
The chapters alternate between the second-person narrative of the reader in search of a complete novel, and the beginnings of each new, fragmentary text he finds.
Calvino attributes each opening to a different author, and each is written in a different style, with its own characters, setting and plot. Each is simply a sliver of story, never to possess an ending.
The novel as a whole is an ode to and meditation on the act of reading. Throughout, Calvino explores and celebrates the different modes of and motivations for spending time with books.
Even the shards of each story splintered throughout the text seem aware of and acknowledge the awesome power of the reader.
Calvino rewrites Descartes famous maxim, "I think, therefore I am," as "I read, therefore it writes," privileging the reading over the writing.
In fact, the real hero of the novel is you, the reader.
In a time when the death of the book seems imminent, when the Pew Research Center reports that almost a quarter of Americans do not read, Calvino reminds us of the deep satisfaction that comes from surrendering yourself to a good book.
His character, "the reader," travels great distances and risks many dangers — all in pursuit of the end of a great story.

Link to original review I published on LancasterOnline: http://lancasteronline.com/book_reviews/readers-recommend-italo-calvino-s-if-on-a-winter-s/article_74b0dd78-1697-11e4-a55c-001a4bcf6878.html

A novel that questions the intricacies of the novel? A book that explores the intimacies of reading? Calvino gives us all that and more in *If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.*
It takes a very skillful writer to create a protagonist that can make direct contact with the reader. I've read more novels then I care to remember that attempted to pull this off and couldn't. But here, it's like, oh I don't know, we're handed a puzzle. A puzzle in which each individual piece is beautiful. There are so many dazzling images, brilliant colors, and something about the way they fit together is just radiant. But it feels like, as those pieces fall into place, the whole might be more than we can take. There is so much to process, but there is no question as to whether you have to continue.
Calvino manages to create a heady novel that is both intellectually stimulating and entertaining. You will relish every moment of following the threads of the broken novels within and you will long to find the protagonist in your favorite bookstore to discuss it with. This is one of those books that will make you change the way you think, that will change you in general, and you'll never be able to look at reading in quite the same way again. And then, don't stop here, at this one novel, read everything of Calvino's that you can find.

We recently read this book for a literary theory class, and it fascinated me so much that I found myself rereading it after having just finished. For anyone interested in theory, in language itself, in the origin of thoughts and ideas and how our perceptions shape the world, YOU MUST OWN THIS BOOK.
While other reviews I've read have ranked this as equivalent to a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, it is most likely because the effort wasn't prolonged enough to grasp Calvino's point, which is this: That we are taught what to expect and what to ask of our authors, and anything we read is falsified in an attempt to appeal to our tastes. The book consists of 10 novels, each begun, and never allowed closure, with a connecting story that ties in the search for the original authorship of these books, and the frustration at never being able to arrive at who the author is and discover the true meaning. Each attempt to begin anew ends with narrator yanking you from the story; by doing this Calvino steps out of the authorial role--he denies the book categorization by changing what is happening each time we expect something to specific to occur. He does this specifically because he does not want us to be in the mode of simply surveying information that we already have figured the path of. The book has no genre--it becomes its own, and our understanding of what we read, why we read and how we read is forever impacted. By denying himself access to shaping the novel, he requires the reader's complete attention in determining the ultimate outcome of the book.
I bought a used copy and ripped it to pieces rereading and underlining and now have to buy a new copy. If you have an open mind, this will definitely be a book you will not regret.

One definition of metafiction is "Fiction that deals, often playfully and self-referentially, with the writing of fiction or its conventions." That could pretty much describe Italo Calvino's "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler," a gloriously surreal story about the hunt for a mysterious book.

A reader opens Italo Calvino's latest novel, "If On A Winter's Night A Traveller," only to have the story cut short. Turns out it was a defective copy, with another book's pages inside. But as the reader tries to find out what book the defective pages belong to, he keeps running into even more books and more difficulties -- as well as the beautiful Ludmilla, a fellow reader who also received a defective book.

With Ludmilla assisting him (and, he hopes, going to date him), the reader then explores obscure dead languages, publishers' shops, bizarre translators and various other obstacles. All he wants is to read an intriguing book. But he keeps stumbling into tales of murder and sorrow, annoying professors, and the occasional radical feminist -- and a strange literary conspiracy. Will he ever finish the book?

In its own way, "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler" is a mystery story, a satire, a romance, and a treasure hunt. Any book whose first chapter explains how you're supposed to read it has got to be a winner -- "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, "If On A Winter's Night a Traveler." Relax. Concentrate." And so on, with Calvino gently joking and chiding the reader before actually beginning his strange little tale.

As cute as that first chapter is, it also sets the tone for this strange, funny metafictional tale, which not only inserts Calvino but the reader. That's right -- this book is written in the second person, with the reader as the main character. "You did this" and "you did that," and so on. Only a few authors are brave enough to insert the reader... especially in a novel about a novel that contains other novels. It seems like a subtle undermining of reality itself.

It's a bit disorienting when Calvino inserts chapters from the various books that "you" unearth -- including ghosts, hidden identities, Mexican duels, Japanese erotica, and others written in the required styles. Including some cultures that he made up. Upon further reading, those isolated chapters reveal themselves to be almost as intriguing as the literary hunt. Especially since each one cuts off at the most suspenseful moment -- what happens next? Nobody knows!

It all sounds hideously confusing, but Calvino's deft touch and sense of humor keep it from getting too weird. There are moments of wink-nudge comedy, as well as the occasional poke at the publishing industry. But Calvino also provides chilling moments, mildly sexy ones, and a tone of mystery hangs over the whole novel.

At times it feels like Calvino is in charge of "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler"... and at other times, it feels like "you" are the one at the wheel. Just don't put this in the stack of Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First. Pure literary genius.

I have never read anything quite like this book. Not just because it is in second-person narrative, but because of it's meta narration about what it is about. No question about it, this book is original and entertaining, and packed full of meaning. That said, the nature of the book is disjointed and stitched together with thin thread. Although the disunity has its purpose, it's a bit eccentric.

Metafiction proliferated during the 70's and 80's at an alarming rate. Most of the great author's of the twentieth century had a go of it, from Jack Kerouac, Joyce Carol Oates and Vladimir Nabokov to Paul Auster, William S. Burroughs, Don Delillo and Umberto Eco. Most likely the simplest definition for the term "metafiction" is writing about the act of writing itself, usually in a fictional form.

A vast majority of "experts" in this literary genre call it "post modern", that is to say, pastiche instead of parody, a conscious attempt to mix genre's, the collage effect, or to quote a cliché, "Life imitating Art". Reading metafiction can become tedious, at times extremely frustrating because the rules of writing are never followed, traditional narrative structure is consciously ignored, forcing the "reader" to actively engage in the text. Calvino's "Traveller" takes this concept a step further; similar to the music of Tchaikovsky or Beethoven, the listener or reader are called upon the task of `re-creation', they are no more only passive-effect-points, but active participants' and co-creators' of the music or story. In this novel, Calvino asks the reader to participate in the creative process, fill in the gaps, and strive to make the story complete.

Interestingly, Calvino employs the reader from the very start: "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel "On a Winter's Night a Traveller". By beginning the novel in the second person singular, the reader is jolted into communion with the text, no longer safe in the comfortable zone of passive objectivity. As opposed to Realist literature, the omnipotent, single voice of the author who knows all, `Traveller" is an extended novel, going beyond traditional structure, and includes numerous voices, including the reader, shooting off in a thousand directions at many different times, never truly arriving at a destination. On a surface level, the text appears to merely indulge in self-consciousness: writing for writing's sake - something entirely preoccupied with itself. However, beyond this seemingly empty literary device, we see Calvino inserting subtle clues as to how to go about moving through this labyrinth he has created:

"This volume's pages are uncut: the first obstacle opposing your patience. Armed with a good paper knife, you prepare to penetrate its secrets. With a determined slash you cut your way between the little page and the beginning of the beginning of the first chapter. And then... (P. 33)

"Traveller" is a palimpsest, stories embedded in stories, inviting the reader to slash through its pages with a paper knife to discover its multiple meanings and possible interconnections. The "reader" becomes the central focus, and is required to finish what the writing begins.

Metafiction is not for everybody. Not long ago, I spoke to someone who became so impatient with "Traveller" that after only reading the third page, she threw the book in the bin. However, out of the many metafictional works around, "Traveller stands out as one of the best.

Recommended.

Italo Calvino is a post modernist writer, so if you aren't interested in some really weird writing, this book is not for you.

Let me explain...
This novel begins with one story and at the end of the chapter without any sort of conclusion to the first story, a new story begins. SO if you are someone who needs to know how things end do not pick this book up. However, Calvino is not your crappy romance novel's author and there is a reason we had to read this in World Lit, it is an experience completely unique to any other novel you will ever read. You will be frustrated, surprised, and every time the story changes without any kind of closure you are going to realize how much you love reading in the first place.

So go ahead and give it a try! Even if you hate it you can still impress your peers by adding Calvino to the list of authors you have read.

Most of the glowing reviews of this novel employ words like "experimental" and "conceptual", which might lead one to believe that "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler" is a pretentious tome that one must slog through for the sake of art, an intellectual height to be scaled by the elitist literati. In reality, the accomplishment of Italo Calvino's masterfully constructed book is the fact that it reads like a thriller while operating on several levels of meaning. Toward the end of the novel, Calvino, writing as the fictional author Silas Flannery, makes this statement: "writing always means hiding something in such a way that it is discovered". Indeed, the novel's maddening appeal lies chiefly in the irresistable pull of its labyrinthal construction, its dizzying maze of false starts, dead ends and trap doors.

The conceit of the novel is, as other reviewers have stated, a series of opening chapters from unfinished novels. "The Reader", addressed by Calvino in the second person, begins reading, in the first chapter, what he believes to be the new novel by Italo Calvino, "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler". However, the novel breaks off abruptly after the first chapter, and the next section deals with the Reader's attempt to discover the cause of this unexpected interruption. Returning to the store where he purchased the volume, the Reader meets the main female character in the novel (the Other Reader). The rest of the work is comprised of alternating sections; every other chapter is the beginning of an unfinished novel, alternating with chapters following the Reader and the Other Reader in their attempt to get to bottom of the increasingly intricate mystery of unfinished novels, ghost writers and various apocrypha.

At first, the unorthodox structure of the work is effectively annoying; one experiences "The Reader"'s frustration firsthand as Calvino breaks off story after story with his chain of disembodied first chapters. But this is actually a testament to the power of Calvino's writing, in that with each "first chapter" Calvino entrances us anew, lifting us right out of the existing novel and persuasively transporting us, in a matter of paragraphs, into completely disparate locales and circumstances. There are, however, noticeable parallels between the various "first chapters"; the first person narrator in each chapter is essentially the same character: an unnamed solipsist with an overactive libido, who seems to be always shadow-boxing with some mysterious other, usually his male romantic rival.

Though the form of the novel is unconventional, Calvino's artful prowess carries the reader effortlessly along, and the narrative is bouyed by a winning mix of lowbrow and gallows humor (at one point the author chides The Reader, "You're the absolute protagonist of this book, very well; but do you believe that gives you the right to have carnal relations with all the female characters?"). Anyone willing to give themself over to this innovative "experiment" will quickly find themself happily lost in Calvino's engrossing and ingenious maze.

Of all my reading over the last twenty years this book is the one that has stayed with me the most strongly.
This is not because it has the best plot or the best characterisation, or because it has the best start or the best ending, or because it was the easiest novel to read. It's impact lies in the fact that it is a novel about reading novels, about the romance of reading - and the frustration too. In a sense, this novel actually taught me to read.
The ten chapters are each written in a different style and Calvino plays with the effects these styles have on the reader. I loved the sense of frustration at knowing only the first chapter of each of the books would ever come to light. I read this just after leaving Umberto Eco's 'The Name of the Rose' on a train in France - the sensation was both infuriating and delightful and this is what Calvino conjures up here.
While the hero may never get his novel finished, there is at least some potential for him to finally meet with the elusive Ludmilla. Will he get the girl? You'll have to read the start of ten novels to find out!

As other reviewers have described more eloquently than I, this book is sort of a story within a story written in the second person. It is very clever and creative and even though I do not love this book, it is certainly memorable. The book is sure to stick in my mind for a long time because of its uniqueness. This is one of those books that you have to want to read. I can't recommend this to the average person or even the average reader. But if you come across Calvino, give this a shot and maybe it will stick with you as one of your favorites.

My first impressions of this novel almost misled me into putting the book away for another, which I almost never do. It seemed that the writer was working too hard to be coy, cute, precious and intrusive with his readers and I resented it. When the artifice is overpowering, as I find is sometimes the case in reading Pynchon, then the literary value of the work seems somehow diminished. Fortunately, I was able to see Calvino as a fabulist for which more patience in the willing suspension of disbelief should be granted, much like Jose Saramago, for example, and my patience with Calvino was rewarded. After all, fables by their nature work within a structure where the artifice is simply inherent in the literary medium. Calvino turns upside-down the conventions of plot design and pushes its bounds until the reader understands that his apparently absurd story line unfolds much like life reveals itself. When he manages to pull off this effect and the artifice-laden fable assumes an astonishing versimilitude, then one has to give him credit for great invention in his narrative style and I do. "Myths and mysteries consist of impalpable little granules, like the pollen that sticks to the butterfly's legs; only those who have realized this can expect revelations and illuminations." (p. 254) If you believe that every novel must have a beginning, middle and end, then read Calvino patiently and enjoy the journey as well as the destination.

After reading Dubliners and Ulysses, I thought that contemporary fiction had reached its peak of perfection, both in terms of style and prose. Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveller" redefined what a book can be and is the singularly most creative book I have ever read. Within a tightly constructed shell, Calvino has transcended the confines of the traditional novel, and written a book that examines what books, reading and writing are all about. Just as James Joyce captured the essence of the solitary human condition in the twentieth century in 40 pages in "The Dead", and T.S. Eliot did the same in poetry in "The Waste Land", Calvino has summed up the essence of reading and writing and the human need to communicate and love without telling one story, but ten, or rather 11, when you include the main story: the reader. I highly recommend this book> It absolutely changed the way I looked at books, and broadened my horizons more than any work I have ever read.

This book should quite possibly be titled (and yes, i know changing the title would disrupt one of the prime conciets of the book) 'I, Italo Calvino, will now demonstrate my vast intellectual superiority, while attacking many of the staid conventions of "fiction", and actually making you smile and/or laugh, as well.'
OK, that really shouldn't be considered for the title, but I think you get my point. This intricate novel alternately screws with the very notion of narration, plot, the idea of fiction, the act of reading/being a reader, and well. . . . pretty much everything you've become bored of.
That fact is, if you're here your probably somewhat interested, and if you're even somewhat interested you should go on and pick up this book. Granted, if you have a problem with parallel narration (it is all linear narration), or are frustarted easily by lack of plot resolution, you might step catiously. Also, if you're tolerance for witty authors who know they are witty is low, you definately want to steer clear- Calvino is flexing his synapses here, and having an absolutely good time.
As far as the plot (or story or whatever) goes, it's almost ancilliary, yet absolutely necessary, insofar as the point of the book is reading it, but the 'getting' goes on on such a blatant level, that it's almost like finding a meditative state in the vibrations of a chainsaw while someone's trying to cut your head off with it. or something like that.
Anyway, this book, like . . . rocks.
Especially recommended for curing post-academia, post-new critical theory, ficiton phobia- After graduation I only read non-fiction up until this book restored my faith in the written word.

Read Chapter 1. Finished Chapter 1. Began Chapter 2. Scratched my head. Finished chapter 2. Began chapter 3. Began laughing at the game Calvino was playing with me. And wondering what he was going to do to me next.
I would never have guessed all the different roads I would go down as I read this book.
You'll fall in love. You'll pull your hair out. You'll throw the book across the room. And then you'll go pick it up again.
Any attempts to describe this book any better than this will either not be well-understood or will ruin the effect of discovering it for yourself.
If you are prepared to put aside your standard concepts of literary narrative and explore a new experiment, this book is definitely for you.

There were a few well written parts that piqued my interest, but that was about it. I found the second person perspective irritating and the interweaving storyline dull. The unfinished stories had better potential than the actual book. But at least it created some great bookclub discussion and bonding over our distaste for the book.

started reading this book with a considerable degre of expectation. I was familiar with the concept of the book, wich I though was quite brilliant, in particular the second person narrative that enables you to feel as if you are the character in the book. As I read it I was supreised at Calvino's capacity to sustain our interest in narratives that you know from the start that will be interrupted and the palyfull humor in the "Reader's" segments. However, as the Reader's story progresses, it becomes prepousterous and uninteresting, with little credibility and character development. I found it ironic that after a certain point I was more interested in the incomplete narratives than I was in the story of the reader. The end was abrupt, rushed and unsatisfatory. Despite all that I was never bored with the book (just sligtly annoyed that such a great first half was considerably marred by an exagerated and preposterous second half), It had great insights and views on creativity, as well as in the writing and reading processes. All in all, I found it to be quite a pleasent and challenging read. It could have been a masterpiece, if not for the second half of the book.