If on a Winters Night [Paperback]

Italo Calvina (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 6, 2002

One of the most unusual love affairs in literature, If On A Winter?s Night A Traveller is a captivating game of suspense into which we are irresistibly pulled. (1995)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[Italo Calvino is] one of the world's best fabulists."
--John Gardner, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"Calvino is a wizard."
--Mary McCarthy, NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
"[Calvino] manages to charm and entertain the reader in the teeth of a scheme designed to frustrate all reasonable readerly expectations."
--John Updike, THE NEW YORKER
"Calvino is that very rare phenomenon, a true original . . . If on a winter's night a traveler is breathtakingly complex and self-conscious (there are moments when it quite literally makes one gasp with astonishment) . . . [yet it] is one of the most accessible and enchanting novels written in the last fifty years."
--from the Introduction by Peter Washington --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. During the war he was a member of the Italian Resistance and joined the Communist Party, although he later left in 1957. One of the most respected writers of our time, his best-known works of fiction include Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveller, Marcovaldo and Mr Palomar. In 1981 he was awarded the prestigious French Legion d’Honneur. He died in Siena in 1985.

Italo Calvino (15 October 1923-19 September 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). Lionised in Britain and America, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death, and a noted contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Product Details

• Paperback: 260 pages
• Publisher: Key Porter Books (June 6, 2002)
• ISBN-10: 1550136844
• ISBN-13: 978-1550136845
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #758,771 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If on a winter's night a traveler... or not?, February 8, 2005

By 

E. A Solinas "ea_solinas" (MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (Everyman's Library Classics) (Hardcover)

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.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Confusing but not without interest, March 16, 2005

By 

HORAK (Zug, Switzerland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (Everyman's Library Classics) (Hardcover)

Has the book you're holding really been written by the author mentioned on the cover? We readers rarely ask ourselves this question but in Mr Calvino's novel, even this simple assumption is questioned. The story is quite confusing indeed because nothing is as it appears.

But apart from the plot, Mr Calvino reflects on interesting topics which in my view save the book. For instance the reader's dilemma of choosing the appropriate novel among the thousand existing publications, the required ingredients to create suspense in a plot, the fact that books are easily defined entities which can be enjoyed without risks compared to the elusive quality of real-life existence, the pleasure of using a paper knife as the reader cuts his way through a novel or the problem posed by someone reading a text which may impose an undesirable pace on the listener. The author also casts a critical glance at universities as literary institutions which have forgotten that literature can be enjoyed in a natural, innocent and primitive way without having to be lacerated by intellectual analysis.

5.0 out of 5 stars The adventure of reading..., December 23, 2011

By 

Andy - See all my reviews

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This review is from: If On A Winter's Night A Traveller (Kindle Edition)

I consider true literature to be something that has the unique characteristic that it will try to explore ideas that are new - imagined or otherwise but new - and attempt to portray them with words. If it succeeds in conveying some meaning to the reader, then the work itself succeeds. But at it's limit, in one extreme case, the reader, however gifted she/he maybe, might find it difficult to express the same ideas, of whose understanding she/he believes to have completely mastered, in words much different from that used in the book itself, or in the other extreme, find a flurry of words crowding over each other to do the same. After reading the book, I am left with ideas of both these types. Calvino's imagination and gift with words surpass anything that I could imagine about imagination and usage of words themselves.

It's a radical way of writing a novel, and I never expected to be addressed myself when reading it. As other readers have mentioned here, the book starts off by declaring that it is incomplete. From there, the reader of the book (that is yourself), takes a dizzying journey, starting with perambulations within the city, in search of the rest of the story, through journeys across countries, finally ending where he (you?) started. On the way, he runs into other books (which you read, but all breaking off at some climax), other readers, conspiracies, ghost-writers ...

Everyone who reads gets involved in the plot-lines developed in a novel, and some might imagine themselves to be one of the characters in the novel. Here, the protagonist is the reader - yourself - and the plot-line is an exploration of reading itself, hence it is even more compelling an involvement. The journey of the protagonist and of the characters that he reads reflect in an almost perfect way the personal journey that you embark upon in reading a novel (this novel) - the emotions, the adrenaline, the moments of irritation with distractions, the re-reads to find the exact meaning ...

Each of the stories in the book is written in language that transports you to that parallel universe where the story is happening. Through them, you realize that it is possible for the crux of a story to be the introduction and the setting for the ending; the ending itself might trivialize this alternative reality into which you were so pleasingly and totally transported, and hence the story itself might do without one.

This is my favourite book up until now, and possibly until I read Calvino's other works.