I adore Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, a wistful meditation on the meaning of place and identity that I have now read several times. This inspired me to read a few of his other works. If on a winter's night a traveler is a similarly cerebral novel, if I can fairly call it a novel, at all. It is a series of nested narratives, with each chapter breaking off mid-stride and leaving the reader frustrated, just at the point of interest. As the work progresses, though, the larger narrative emerges. The Reader (you, holding the book) becomes the protagonist, and his (my, your) frustration becomes central to the flow of the plot.
Just as Invisible Cities was about a larger concept than its literal subject (place, itself, and memory), so too, If on a winter's night comes to be about the very process of reading and writing, about what it means to construct a narrative out of an infinite number of possible narratives, and about authorship. The notion of "the author" is one that has been much discussed in critical literary theory (and famously killed off by Roland Barthes in his The Death of the Author), but Calvino approaches the subject obliquely. He constructs his image of The Author slowly, over the course of the fragmentary chapters (signaled by the fragmentary title), so that the reader considers the subject before even realizing that he has.
I do find one irony, here, which is that every sentence bears the clear authorial presence of Calvino, a writer with a very distinct voice. If fakes and forgeries and "real" works of fiction cannot (and need not) be distinguished, why can I never loose sight of Calvino, himself? He is the only real thread tying the work together.
I almost gave up on this book twice, but in the end, have come to think it something brilliant. Give it a shot, and persevere through to "the end."
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