If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino. Mariner Books Classics (ISBN: 9780156439619) 1982 (first published in Italian in 1979).
Summary: A reader purchases a book only to find most of it is missing and seeks the rest of the story.
Imagine you have just visited your favorite bookstore and spot an intriguing book, If on a winter’s night a traveler. You get home, curl up in your easy chair, get drawn into the story and then find the remaining pages are scramble and cannot read any more.
And so you go back to the store to exchange it for another copy. While there, you meet a fellow booklover, Ludmilla, looking for the same book. The books are replace but you find it is a different story by a different author. You and Ludmilla team up to track down the conclusion of the story and your quest takes you through lit seminars, a love affair, an encounter with a scam translator, a book fraud conspiracy, and a frustrated author. An each of the “replacements” is the beginning of a different story, written by different author in a different genre.
That’s Calvino’s novel in a nutshell. After an opening chapter on the nature of reading, something we readers rarely reflect upon, the “story” proceed by first addressing you, the reader, and the lead protagonist in the “frame story” followed by the broken-off story.
Toward the end, a character strings together the titles of the ten stories, discovering it forms a kind of a sentence:
If on a winter’s night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, 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— What story down there awaits its end?—he asks, anxious to hear the story.
What to make of all this? To begin with, Calvino makes the reader the real protagonist. So often, readers are anonymous in the background. Instead, Calvino’s readers quest for stories, really the story. And might that be the case in our world? Is the real story what we make of and how we connect the various pieces of stories?
Alternatively, I wondered if Calvino simply found a way to string together ten stories he couldn’t finish! If so, it was among the most successful cases of writer’s block in history!
Perhaps Calvino meant a wake-up call to the indifferent or jaded reader, addressed in his opening;
“It’s not that you expect anything in particular from this particular book. You’re the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences, from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you…”
To read Calvino, at least this story is to evoke a reaction. Either you throw the book across the room with disgust. Or you become engrossed with this quirky, somewhat absurd tale around the ten stories. And perhaps that’s what Calvino wanted.
I’ll leave it for you to decide.
