Melissa read and liked Choupette's review of If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Picador Books):

"When I was 17 I saw an exhibition of Yves Klein (corps, couleur, immatériel) at Beaubourg in Paris. As I stood in front of his blue monochromes, I felt as if I was standing in front of a hole in the surface of the universe, a rupture in the fabric o...more When I was 17 I saw an exhibition of Yves Klein (corps, couleur, immatériel) at Beaubourg in Paris. As I stood in front of his blue monochromes, I felt as if I was standing in front of a hole in the surface of the universe, a rupture in the fabric of space-time. And my life changed perceptibly.

From that moment on, I began to think about art in terms of three poles (in my mind they're like magnetic poles emanating electromagnetic waves and doing cool stuff with each other): the artist, the viewer, and the work itself. It is the way these three poles interact that determines the success or failure of the artwork. A simple concept, perhaps, but one that revolutionised my experience of art.

For some reason, it never occurred to me to apply this idea to literature, even though I've always thought of it as a form of art. Until, that is, I read If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, which is a book that lends itself to this analysis as if it was designed for it (which in fact it probably was). At least at first.

In large part, this is because both the author and the reader appear as characters and the book itself is examined consciously from every angle. Hopelessly, irretrievably meta and occasionally a little irritating in its self-consciousness, it's totally brilliant.

The author is represented by two characters, Silas Flannery and Ermes Marana, who are usually interpreted as being two two halves of Italo Calvino's personality, or something. I care not! I hate literary critics, they can all go to hell. Anyway - they are the first pole. Silas Flannery is this weird guy with a problem - or something. It gets unclear. He can't write, he has writer's block, something along those lines. But he could write - he used to churn them out like rabbits, to mix my metaphors, or something. His books were good/bad/brilliant/terrible/profound/shallow/alloftheabove. Something. One loses track. Marana, on the other hand (or the same hand?) is a translator, possibly. But he also steals books, or kidnaps writers and forces them to write books, or tries to make a machine that writes books (in Japan), or something. He's a bit weird.

Much of the book is written in the second person, which can get annoying. But, like a choose-your-own-adventure, it makes you, the reader and second pole, a character in the book. Except that you don't get to choose your adventure, ever. You get swept up in events and suddenly you're a man and you're obsessed with a woman who is totally irritating and in real life you would never look twice at her because she drives you FUCKING CRAZY and nothing really makes sense because you keep trying to find this stupid book only to find all these other stupid books, all of which start really well but you never manage to get past the first chapter because you're too busy being swept up in multinational dictatorship conspiracies and being arrested and forced to stare at machines that write books (in Japan?) and oh god it's all so twisted and bizarre that you don't know which way is up any more. It - it's pretty cool.

The book itself, being the third pole in our analysis, is constantly discussed by the characters. Every second chapter (I will dub them the 'normal' story) follows 'you', Ludmilla (the irritating woman with whom you are obsessed), the mysterious 'other reader' (who may or may not be Ludmilla), and various other weird and wonderful people. The other chapters each consist of the first chapter of another novel.

And there's this wonderful section of the book (in the 'normal' story) that starts like this:

"Two writers, living in two chalets on opposite slopes of the valley, observe each other alternately... One of the two is a productive writer, the other a tormented writer. The tormented writer watches the productive writer filling pages with uniform lines, the manuscript growing in a pile of neat pages. In a little while the book will be finished: certainly a best seller - the tormented writer thinks with a certain contempt but also with envy. He considers the productive writer no more than a clever craftsman, capable of turning out machine-made novels catering to the taste of the public; but he cannot repress a strong feeling of envy for that man who expresses himself with such methodical self-confidence...
The productive writer watches the tormented writer as the latter sits down at his desk, chews his fingernails, scratches himself, tears a page to bits, gets up and goes into the kitchen to fix himself some coffee, then some tea, then camomile, then reads a poem by Holderlin (while it is clear that Holderlin has absolutely nothing to do with what he is writing)... The productive writer has never like d the works of the tormented writer; reading them, he always feels as if he is on the verge of grasping the decisive point, but then it eludes him and he is left with a sensation of uneasiness. But now that he is watching him write, he feels this man is struggling with something obscure, a tangle, a road to be dug leading no one knows where; at times he seems to see the other man walking on a tight-rope stretched over the void, and he is overcome with admiration..."

And, after the 'other reader' turns up (Ludmilla?), it continues like this:

"The young woman receives the two manuscripts. After a few days she invites the authors to her house, together, to their great surprise. "What kind of joke is this?" She says. "You've given me two copies of the same novel!"...

And so on and so forth.

And would you look at that, would you for god's sake fucking look. It's an extended metaphor for the whole novel! The tortured writer writes the 'normal' story, in which not all that much seems to happen, and the productive writer writes the numerous beginnings of novels, churning them out like they have nothing else to do. Oh my, could you get any more meta than that? Right there, we have author(s), reader, book. Three poles, all interacting crazily with their electromagnetic wave-thingies that most certainly don't obey the normal laws of physics. And, well, maybe it's effectively the reader who writes the book. Maybe the book writes itself through some random shuffling of the wind or something. In any case, it's not like the author writes a bunch of words and then some crazy person sits down to read them. I mean, who does that? Seriously.

So this is what happens. Things start out nice and structured, each chapter separate and individual, and the alternating 'normal' chapters follow a nice, straightforward, slightly-zany-but-nonetheless-within-the-realms-of-possibility course. But then they start to get mixed up, intertwined. Out of nowhere there is suddenly an international conspiracy involving a machine that writes books (in Japan, but somehow also South America) and the 'normal' chapters are looking weirder than anything else you've ever seen. Because, you see, he's blurring the boundaries here. The three poles aren't nearly so well-defined and distinct as we thought they were. It's all a big tangled mess of electromagnetic waves and people and characters and loose pages and bits of circuitry (from the Kindles) flying everywhere. Authors are readers, readers are writers, machines are writers (and readers and books). Books are... what are books, anyway?

This whole book was Calvino's response to the post-modernist debate that was happening in the world in the sixties and seventies. I don't claim to understand it or be able to accurately represent it, but it involved Roland Barthes, post-structuralism, structuralism, Claude Levi-Strauss, and about a billion other people and isms. Half of me thinks it's fascinating and wouldn't it be just dandy to spend a lifetime trying to work out what the hell was going on, while the other half is pretty much convinced it's a load of rubbish and all we look for when we read is pretty language. The whole debate was mixed up in all that stuff about what literature is and what literature is for and... stuff. It makes me tired just to think about it.

But Calvino is brilliant. He writes beautifully. Every beginning-of-novel is completely enthralling. You get carried away, and when it gets broken off you genuinely want to know what happens next. Especially that Japanese philosophical erotica one (what was going on there, anyway?), and also the one with the duel. It's all pastiche, but it's so much better than the actual stuff it's pastich-ing (unlike Cloud Atlas, which reproduces each genre so accurately that it effectively magnifies all its faults, which is most of its problem) that you barely even notice you're reading a weird sort of trashy-thriller-thing.

This is the first conceptual novel I've read (admittedly, I haven't read all that many) whose concept enhances rather than limits it. Books like Cloud Atlas and Exercices de Style seem to me to be trapped in a gilded cage: beautiful, wonderful concepts that in their beauty and perfection prevent the authors from saying anything meaningful, or at least from saying it in a way that's not pretentious and annoying. Their structure renders them sterile, cold, unable to adapt and change, mired and frozen in the process of striving for a new means of expression. It's novelty for the sake of novelty, and after the first few chapters, boring. But this, this...

Guys!

It's good. It's more than good.

You should read it.(less) "

Melissa liked a trivia question:
I just met a girl named Maria ... West Side Story, of course. But who else might have said this in the opening chapters of a well-known book? see if you know the answer »