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If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

Italo Calvino,

William Weaver (Translator)

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Mar 05, 2025 Apollo Anderson rated it really liked it

Shelves: books-i-own, philosophy, communication, art, writing, inspiration, faves

You first hear of this book through a Wikipedia guessing game, an absurd yet fittingly modern path to literary discovery. A week later, you peer into a little free library in your neighborhood and are shocked to see a faded spine with the words 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler'. The Bhagavad Gita is in your hands. You hesitate. The wisdom of Krishna for the fragmented dreamwork of Calvino? You make the trade, an offering to the gods of narrative experimentation.

You begin to read, and the first You first hear of this book through a Wikipedia guessing game, an absurd yet fittingly modern path to literary discovery. A week later, you peer into a little free library in your neighborhood and are shocked to see a faded spine with the words 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler'. The Bhagavad Gita is in your hands. You hesitate. The wisdom of Krishna for the fragmented dreamwork of Calvino? You make the trade, an offering to the gods of narrative experimentation.

You begin to read, and the first chapter grips you—the momentum, the cleverness, the invitation into a world where you, the Reader, are the protagonist. You revel in the structure, or perhaps its absence. Each story is a door, slightly ajar, leading to another door, slightly more ajar, leading to another door that—ah, it is suddenly shut. You curse Calvino. You praise him. You set the book down. You pick it up again. The staccato rhythm pushes and pulls at your attention, an exercise in literary trust. When the prose is rich, intoxicating, you crave more. When it lulls, it is a relief to move on.

Some chapters hum in your mind long after you turn the page. Chapter 1—a masterstroke, a glimpse of what could have been had the book chosen the path of linearity. The excerpt from Silas Flannery's diary—a standout. What story down there awaits its end?—the very question you ask yourself as each tale is yanked away. Others drift past like fog—On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon, Without fear of wind or vertigo—mere echoes of greater structures.

You admire Calvino’s dance with perspective. The shifting authorship, the meta-narrative that folds in on itself like a Möbius strip, the way it scratches an itch in your brain you did not know you had. This is not just a novel; it is a dialogue between writer and reader, a commentary on the act of reading itself. And then, a surprise: Leaning from the steep slope, with its paranoia-laced prose, awakens something familiar—The Crying of Lot 49? Deleuze? A schizophrenic fugue of meaning-making, an attempt to stitch together the abyss. You are not Deleuzean, nor schizophrenic, but you are a fan of both.

Would you recommend this book? Yes. To whom? To the restless, the distracted, the seekers of literary labyrinths. To those who wish to experience the frustration and euphoria of unfinished stories. To those who, in reading, recognize that they too are being read.

Now you, the Reader, reach the end of the review. But is it truly the end? You suspect not. You close the tab, but the thought lingers. Somewhere, another Reader is beginning. ...more

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Aug 16, 2024 Zain marked it as to-read

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