The novel begins with "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." Highly off-beat, post-modern and at times close to surreal, this novel has enthralled many a young person longing to be a writer. It is a full self-analysis of its own purpose. Narrated in second person, it breaks the binds of form that less aspiring books easily succumb to.
The stories in the book are all different and intertwine, shifting in each to a different protagonist and setting. Each story is unfinished, with the intention of motivating the primary "you" to search for the genesis script. What could a continuously interrupted narrative look like, becomes a prominent question for the reader.
Personally, the book is difficult at times to decipher, especially as the amount of characters and narratives increase. It revels on showing the world as a place of labyrinths and mirrors in its own unique manner. This unfortunately comes at the expense of enthralling the reader. That being said, Calvino has a number of philosophical thoughts on the purpose of the book in general that are worth remembering. From "In a network of lines that enhance": "Ideally, the book would begin by giving the sense of a space occupied by my presence, because all around me there are only inert objects, including the telephone, a space that apparently cannot contain anything but me, isolated in my interior time, and then there is the interruption of the continuity of time, the space is no longer what it was before because it is conditioned by the will of this object that is calling. The book would have to begin by conveying all this not merely immediately but as a diffusion through space and time, of these rings that lacerate the continuity of space and time and will." Musings such as these are golden, but interrupted stories, abstract to begin with, means the reader can and should only invest a limited amount of emotional capital in the overall novel. In short, "If on a winter's night" is clever but not life-changing such as other works of literature. In short, the philosophy overtakes the narrative.
Calvino harbours on the stereotype of reading and sex. "If you are together, if you lie down in the same bed like a settled couple, each will turn on the lamp at the side of the bed and sink into his or her book.....you will find each other fleetingly in the darkness where all separations are erased before divergent dreams draw you again, one to one side and one to the other. But do not wax ironic on this prospect of conjugal harmony. What happier image of a couple could you set against it?" As David Mitchell put it, it is the "plumbable" sentences of Calvino that truly give the book life.
To Calvino, "reading is a discontinuous and fragmentary operation.....the reader's attention indicates some minimal segments, juxtapositions of words, metaphors, syntactic nexuses, logical passages, lexical peculiarities that prove to possess an extremely concentrated density of meaning." "If on a winter's night" requires re-reading to capture all sense of meaning from Calvino.
So while the novel meanders and is exhaustingly abstract, it is also worth preserving for further archaeological study. "If on a winter's night a traveler, outside the town of Malbark, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave." It is worth preserving for the sake that one day it will all come together for you.
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