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morcai's review
challenging
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.75
"What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious"
I'll admit--I genuinely like Calvino for his weird, rambling, built-on-air fiction. I adored Invisible Cities, and his Six Memos for the Next Millennium is a perpetual reread mostly because I like how he phrases things. But his style may not be everyone's cup of tea, especially as If on a winter's night a traveler is written in second person to an assumed-male reader (though the potential for reading queerness into the Reader is there. Much to think about when I reread).
If on a winter's night a traveler unfolds, as I described it to a friend, something like a bibliophibian Arabian Nights. The Reader begins the book by picking up a copy of Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveller, from a bookseller and settling in to read, only to find that the first chapter repeats, ad infinitum, for the entire book. Upon returning to the bookseller, the Reader finds out that there had been a mistake at the publisher's , and pages from another novel, a Polish one called Outside the town of Malbork, have been inserted. And so the Reader (and Ludmilla, a woman he meets, also looking for the novel she read the first chapter of) acquire a copy of what the bookseller says is the real novel they just started...only to find that this new novel is completely different! This cycle continues through the novel, with the Reader and Ludmilla (sometimes referred to as the Other Reader) continuously searching for the last novel, only to have a new one pressed on them.
The frame story unfolds in alternating chapters of frame story and novel opening, each novel different from the last, exploring different themes, different types of story. One seems to be a mystery or spy novel, while another feels distinctly Soviet, and yet a third like a psychological thriller. Most of them, I understand even why the reader feels compelled to finish them (special exception for On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon, for reasons I'll explain later)
The book also detours about three-quarters of the way through into what feels like a fever-dream B-plot about apocrypha, translation, what a reader wants to get out of reading, authoritarian government and censorship. I'm not certain exactly why, but I'm also certain more will reveal itself upon rereads. It's an interesting B-plot, but it never really feels like it gets resolved, hence the description of it as a fever dream.
So all of that, I enjoyed! The layered novels, the weird B-plot, the philosophical points Calvino raises. What didn't I like?
For one...the relationship between the main characters. There is, at least theoretically, a romance between the Reader and Ludmilla going on in this novel, but it's exceptionally difficult to understand why (beyond that the Reader is "male" and Ludmilla is a woman) or even what Ludmilla (or her sister Lotaria) see in the Reader. It's very much a Straight Man Writing Fiction relationship where the woman Represents Something or bullshit like that. It's just Not Good.
The other thing I particularly disliked is related to the content warnings I've appended to this review.
Two of the later novels get Sexually Weird. On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon seems to have a plot entirely driven by the weird sexual hangups of all the characters--the main character is interested in the daughter of his teacher, but ends up instead having sex with his teacher's wife [waves hands] it's all very weird, and again, very Straight Man Writing. The next "novel" Around an empty grave, also has scenes that felt very much like sexual assault. Do better Calvino!
Overall: dense, philosophically entertaining and well worth a reread. Docked a point for Calvino being Weird About Women. Docked another quarter point for leaving the Marana/censorship plotline up in the air.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Infidelity and Sexual assault
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