If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler in Never too Late to Read Classics

May 19, 2019 Yair Ben-Zvi rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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This is a tough novel to rate if only because it's hard to determine Calvino's intentionality completely. In terms of structure this is novelistic brilliance. Calvino handles his work with a level of skill that is almost divine in its contortions and balancings, its motifs and resonances, but how much is to be treated as parable, as metaphor, and how much is to be judged on its own merits?

The author doesn't help with this as just when something ostensibly solid is given us, as readers, as some f This is a tough novel to rate if only because it's hard to determine Calvino's intentionality completely. In terms of structure this is novelistic brilliance. Calvino handles his work with a level of skill that is almost divine in its contortions and balancings, its motifs and resonances, but how much is to be treated as parable, as metaphor, and how much is to be judged on its own merits?

The author doesn't help with this as just when something ostensibly solid is given us, as readers, as some form of purchase through which we can anchor ourselves, we are quickly and abruptly sent off again on another tangent, all connected, but equally obfuscated. Herein lies the problem. Many a lesser writer would hide the weaknesses of their work in these stylistic penumbras, chalking it up to vagaries that can only be seen as intellectual positives. But Calvino not only accounts for this but also gives it its due in the multiple ways a text can (and at times should) be read.

Among other things this a paean to intellectualism; one can easily read this as Calvino's rendering of Brecht's a-effect, that of deliberately alienating the reader in order to (among other things) truly glean what is being accomplished on the page and what is being ellided. But almost paradoxically it's a simultaneous love letter to the act of reading, reading almost anything, but especially of stories. In this Calvino's precociousness is both at times off putting but also all encompassing. The flaws here are mirrors of the inherent flaws in human perception and attempting to make solid what isn't, what can't be, but in doing so, through reading, writers, readers, and the books themselves, transmute a kind of magic that is indelible, singular, and even alchemical.

Overall I recommend this book with the caveat that one must be patient in letting it unfold. This isn't a stock hothouse plant to be plucked and consumed, but a rare orchid or rose that needs gentle consciousness and understanding before it begins to bloom for you. And when it does, it's something brilliant. ...more

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