If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler in The Obscure Reading Group

Feb 14, 2019 Matthew Ted rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-century, read-2019, read-2021, 1001-list-2006-ed, lit-writ-italian, ml-reads, translated, read-multiple

57th book of 2021. Artist for this review is Argentine painter Lucio Fontana.

You are new in the area and your parents are desperate to get rid of you because although you are only trying to help, you are getting in the way of the moving process—the boxes are too big for you to lift, the lorry-men talk with such cigarette-smoke voices that you cannot understand them or their quips to you, and as much as you'd like to appear helpful, you cannot wait for all the boxes to be gone and everything go ...more

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Feb 16, 2022 Trapper King rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 5-star-favorites

From my first review a few years ago:
"Took quite a bit longer than I needed to with this one. I stretched it as much as I could, because I truly, genuinely didn’t want it to end. Give me a never-ending continuation of this, with the readers and countless books in which for them to dip, and I’d never need another."

Since then, I have generally considered this to be, if not my favorite novel, at least tied for the spot. A couple years on, I have given it a reread.

In 2004, author David Mitchell w From my first review a few years ago:
"Took quite a bit longer than I needed to with this one. I stretched it as much as I could, because I truly, genuinely didn’t want it to end. Give me a never-ending continuation of this, with the readers and countless books in which for them to dip, and I’d never need another."

Since then, I have generally considered this to be, if not my favorite novel, at least tied for the spot. A couple years on, I have given it a reread.

In 2004, author David Mitchell wrote for The Guardian a review of rereading If on a winter's night a traveler, sixteen years after his first read. His closing remark sums up his experience: "however breathtakingly inventive a book is, it is only breathtakingly inventive once. But once is better than never."
This sentiment resonates with me; I didn't have quite the same giddy feeling that I first had. This novel was more-or-less my introduction to this sort of metafictional game playing, an exciting new phenomenon in my reading career. The book had felt like nothing short of magic. But having been through it once already, and having branched out into more complex, postmodern, metafictional, and experimental literature in the interim, I return to this performance of magic with an eye out for the misdirection and sleight of hand, the tricks of the trade. Does this ruin the trick? That's the sort of attitude Mitchell seems to have, and that's where I differ. Sure, the awestruck, childlike wonder is gone; I've learned how the trick is performed. But now I can wonder at how fluid and skilled the magician's moves are.
Yes, I enjoyed the book in a different way than before. I'm sure I'll never be able to experience anything like that first read again. But unlike Mitchell, I'm not relegating the book to some dusty shelf for has-beens and curious artefacts of bygone literary movements. For me, it's still a hoot, and it's still a favorite. Maybe I'll change my mind in 16 years, but I don't think so.

David Mitchell's piece for The Guardian ...more

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Jul 12, 2021 Cindy Tebo rated it it was ok

In some respects, Italo Calvino's novel reminded me of an exercise like those found in an English workbook. Children are given part of a sentence and asked to write the rest of it themselves. Even the title, "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler," feels fragmented. I struggled to get through the threads of plot that went nowhere. I gave up trying to make sense of the novel in its entirety. Perhaps that was the point.

It's a novel about reading a novel. And it is every bit as exciting as it sounds. T ...more

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Jan 28, 2020 Lauren rated it it was amazing

OMFG THIS BOOK. How have I never read it? It will stay with me a LONG time and has a permanent spot on my bookshelf. I never ever reread books and I feel confident I'll return to this one in a couple years. It will hold up.

This is the -THE- book for the Reader in your life. If you are A Reader, get it now; this should be the very next book you read. It will challenge you. It will take you a WHILE to get through it. It will make you underline sentences, write in the margins, look up words, read ...more

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Jan 14, 2019 Walter Schutjens rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery, fiction, reviewed, philosophical-fiction, literature, the-best

Never has my relation to the author of a novel been so entrusted, and yet left me utterly confused and at many times disorientated. It was as if reading a novel looking through a kaleidoscope, while simultaneously having the author of the book tell you exactly what you are seeing through colorful and fragmented narrative lenses. To give a taste of the complexity of the text and the thematic whirlwind seen through subjective, objective, omnipresent, and fourth person perspective; let me try to su ...more

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