If on a winter's night a traveler | Italo Calvino (1979)
Very rarely do I re-read books. I usually consider them part of my collective past, once read. But I'm writing a reference article on this book, so I thought a re-read would be a good idea. Interestingly, it wasn't as much fun the second time around -- maybe because I was already in on the "joke"? maybe because I'm reading it with an extra eye toward critical analysis? Somehow, though, it seems that I never enjoy re-reads as much as I enjoy the initial discovery.
One of the things the novel covers is the process of digitizing the reading experience (this was a cutting-edge concept in 1979!). So, I digitized an excerpt of chapter 1:
I love that it looks like a footprint, walking between books and reading. :)
My Review
If on a winter's night a traveler is not one story but many, or perhaps it is all stories. Each of the ten different narratives contributes a voice to the interwoven plots, expounding on a variety of themes present in many literary forms. Binding all these narratives is the literary search of Reader, the second-person protagonist who just wants to find, among the various fractured narratives he encounters, the resumption and conclusion of the one he first began.
Calvino's debts to other writers, including Jorge Luis Borges and Ludivico Ariosto, is clear, but Calvino reaches outside the Western canon for inspiration as well. In this volume, Calvino demonstrates the true range of his writing, as each narrative example expresses a different style, plot, and narrative voice. But more than that, Calvino challenges the very state of author- and readership in contemporary literature. What, his narrative asks, is the limit of the novel as a literary form? How can that limit be challenged and exploited? How do readers define authors? How do authors define readers? What is the relationship between the two, or does such a relationship in fact exist? Calvino offers his own answers to each of these questions, but as his answers are delivered through the various voices of readers and authors in his story, it's hard to tell what Calvino really thinks. The novel may contain autobiographical elements -- or it may not.
This is a love story, too. For, Calvino asserts, "The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, and the inevitability of death" (p. 259). [This, by the way, is the line to which Dustin Hoffman's character refers in Stranger than Fiction.] Life and death are ever present in this novel, appearing again and again almost as characters who drift through and between the various interwoven narratives.
One of the most intricate elements of the novel is its repeated self-reference. Again and again Calvino reminds the reader of the reading experience, and describes the methodology of the writer, the manifestation of the story, the experience of the reader. The degree of intricacy of this meta-narration does not lend itself well to thorough explanation, as to try to parse it would lead to unnecessary complexity (as occurs in the novel's plot as the story progresses and the line between truth and fiction is blurred, both for characters and reader). It's one of those things that really has to be read to be understood.
Excerpts
"Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or ting except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears." (p. 8)
"You are the story of reader who is sensitive to such refinements; you are quick to catch the author's intentions and nothing escapes you." (p. 25)
"'...they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely until they disappear.'" (p. 49)
"...with a written language it is always possible to reconstruct a dictionary and a grammar, isolate sentences, transcribe them or paraphrase them in another language, whereas I am trying to read in the succession of things presented to me every day the world's intentions toward me, and I grope my way, knowing that there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurks in these things." (p. 61)
"'Life is nothing but trading smells.'" (p. 64)
"I sensed at once that in the perfect order of the universe a breach had opened, an irreparable rent.'" (p. 67)
"Listening to someone read aloud is very different from reading in silence. When you read, you can stop or skip sentences: you are the one who sets the pace. When someone else is reading, it is difficult to make your attention coincide with the tempo of the reading: the voice goes either too fast or too slow.... The text, when you are the reader, is something that is there, against which you are forced to clash." (p. 68)
"'Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be...." (p. 72)
"The story must also work hard to keep up with us, to report a dialogue constructed on the void, speech by speech. For the story, the bridge is not finished: beneath every word there is nothingness." (p. 83)
"'The novel I would most like to read at this moment,' Ludmilla explains, 'should have as its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life on you, simply allowing you to observe its own growth, like a tree, an entangling, as if of branches and leaves...." (p. 92)
"...putting behind you pages lacerated by intellectual analyses, you dream of rediscovering a condition of natural reading, innocent, primitive...." (p. 92)
"Because in this way all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life was too dense and ramified and embroiled for me to bear it always with me, imagine so many lives, each with its own past and the pasts of the other lives that continue to become entangled one with the others." (p. 106)
"...I can be sure that even in this tiny, insignificant episode there is implicit everything I have experienced, all the past, the multiple pasts I have tried in vain to leave behind me, the lives that in the end are soldered into an overall live, my life...." (p. 107)
"...that 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." (p. 115)
"Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book." (p. 153)
"At the moment when ytou most appear to be a united voi, a second person plural, you are two tu's, more separate and circumscribed than before." (p. 154)
"What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space." (p. 156)
"...the book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own completeness." (p. 172)
"The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, 'I read, therefore it writes.'" (p. 176)
"Perhaps instead of a book I could write lists of words, in alphabetical order, an avalanche of isolated words which expresses that truth I still do not know, and from which the computer, reversing its program, could construct the book, my book." (p. 189)
"...the truth of literature consists only in the physicality of the act of writing." (p. 190)
"...writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered...." (p. 193)
"...there is always something essential that remains outside the written sentences; indeed the things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say, and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is unwritten." (p. 203)
"To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and the when in which you vanished." (p. 210)
"'The book I'm looking for... is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world.'" (p. 243)
"The world is so complicated, tangled, and overloaded that to see into it with any clarity you must prune and prune." (p. 244)
"Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings." (p. 255)
B&N.com link
LibraryThing link
GoodReads link
Calvino, Italo. If on a winter's night a traveler. Trans. William Weaver. San Diego, CA: Harvest Books, 1982.