If you are looking for something different in your next read, look no further than Italo Calvino’s classic If on a winter’s night a traveler. Calvino turns the novel form on its head as he weaves in and out of personas and storylines.
Chapter one of the novel starts out speaking directly to the reader, inviting you in:
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvion’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!”
Before you know it, the “you" has transformed into part of the story, by the cleverly engaging speaker:
Perhaps you started leafing through the book already in the shop. Or were you unable to, because it was wrapped in its cocoon of cellophane? Now you are on the bus, standing in the crowd, hanging from a strap by your arm, and you begin undoing the package with your free hand, making movements something like a monkey, a monkey who wants to peel a banana and at the same time cling to the bough.
The end of chapter one finds “you”, the reader, about to begin the actual chapter “If on a winter’s night a traveler.” But following that actual chapter, the numbered chapter two returns to the narrator interrupting to speak again to the reader. Or does he? Because here, you realize the narrator is actually referring to himself as the “you”:
You have now read about thirty pages and you’re becoming caught up in the story. At a certain point you remark: This sentence sounds somehow familiar. In fact, this whole passage reads like something I’ve read before.” … Wait a minute! Look at the page number. Damn! From page 32 you’ve gone back to page 17! What you thought was a stylistic subtlety on the author’s part is simply a printers’ mistake: they have inserted the same pages twice. The mistake occurred as they were binding the volume…it’s the sort of accident that occurs every now and then.
But the rest of the speaker’s book consists entirely of repeats of pages 17 through 32! At this point Calvino’s pacing ramps up to a breakneck pace. The narrator must track down an original copy of the novel. However, just when he thinks he’s found it, he reads the first chapter (which you get to read as well) and it turns out to be a completely different story!
Calvino alternates between these narrator segments and the “novel beginnings” until it is clear that the “novel beginnings” are simply fictional interludes—short stories in and of themselves, interrupted always at a climactic moment—between segments of the actual story, which is of the narrator and his quest to find the original volume he began reading.
This is a brilliant work of "fabulist" literature that will engage and delight you. You will find yourself smiling and laughing aloud throughout as Calvino’s prose dives, curls back on itself, turns and soars—taking you, the reader, on a wild ride.
260 pages.
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