If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler in What's the Name of That Book???

Aug 22, 2007 Erin rated it it was amazing

(William Weaver translation)

Definitely NOT an easy read, but it still gets five stars for the beauty of the writing, the ambition of the narrative and for making the Reader the protagonist. I marked quotes in this book so many times, and generally they were about reading, why we love it, and why it matters. If you are tempted, know that it is written in the second person, and contains fragments of ten (I think) other books, but all are tied to a primary story in a remarkable way.

I was hooked fr (William Weaver translation)

Definitely NOT an easy read, but it still gets five stars for the beauty of the writing, the ambition of the narrative and for making the Reader the protagonist. I marked quotes in this book so many times, and generally they were about reading, why we love it, and why it matters. If you are tempted, know that it is written in the second person, and contains fragments of ten (I think) other books, but all are tied to a primary story in a remarkable way.

I was hooked from the very beginning, with Calvino's classifications of books found at a bookstore:

"In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out: the Books You've Been Planning To Read for Ages, the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success, the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment, the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case, the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer, the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves, the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.
Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.
With a zigzag dash you shake them off and leap straight into the citadel of the New Books Whose Author Or Subject Appeals To You. Even inside this stronghold you can make some breaches in the ranks of the defenders, dividing them into New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Not New (for you or in general) and New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Completely Unknown (at least to you), and defining the attraction they have for you on the basis of your desires and needs for the new and the not new (for the new you seek in the not new and for the not new you seek in the new)."

Now, understand that this started on PAGE FIVE. I was in love immediately.

Other quotes I marked along the way:

" 'Reading,' he says, 'is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead....'
'Or that is not present because it does not yet exist, something desired, feared, possible or impossible,' Ludmilla says. 'Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one knows what it will be...'" (p. 72)

"In this thin, transparent air I feel able to perceive in her unmoving form the signs of that invisible movement that reading is, the flow of gaze and breath, but, even more, the journey of the words through the person, their course or their arrest, their spurts, delays, pauses, the attention concentrating or straying, the returns, that journey that seems uniform and on the contrary is always shifting and uneven." (p. 169)

"You fasten your seatbelt. The plane is landing. To fly is the opposite of traveling; you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and the when in which you vanished. Meanwhile, what do you do? How do you occupy this absence of yourself from the world and of the world from you? You read; you do not raise your eyes from the book between one airport and the other, because beyond the page there is the void, and anonymity of stopovers, of the metallic uterus that contains you and nourishes you, of the passing crowd always different and always the same."
(p. 210) ...more

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Aug 29, 2015 Charlotte rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This novel is a virtuoso performance by a writer who is both a brilliant storyteller and a skilled and versatile stylist. The novel encompasses 10 different stories, each with a distinct style, sewn together into a single narrative. In the hands of a lesser writer, the attempt could have been tedious and gimmicky, but Calvino delights the reader with clever and entertaining stories while, at the same time, making a serious inquiry into the activities of reading and writing and into the relations ...more

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Oct 19, 2007 Bette rated it liked it · review of another edition

Eh. I appreciate that this book is clever, but didn't really enjoy it that much. ...more

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Feb 21, 2016 Christine H rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: abandoned

I wanted to like this, and I can see why others do, but I couldn't get past meh. The fact that it explicitly imposes a male gaze POV on the reader probably didn't help. ...more

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Oct 27, 2007 Matthew Gatheringwater marked it as to-read

available at PenCol

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Aug 10, 2014 Heron rated it really liked it

Curiouser and curiouser. We follow our Reader through a tangled web of words, defining for ourselves what it means to read or be read. To write or be written. To critique or be critiqued. A fascinating exercise, well executed, but two thoughts intruded into my full enjoyment. 1) Less than masterpiece, this felt like a virtuouso's recitation of an étude. Instead of a symphony or aria, I heard scales. Skillful, gorgeous scales, but still scales. Each new story felt like Cal ino was showing off his ...more

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Aug 12, 2008 Kendra Lyris rated it it was amazing

Shelves: own

If on a winter's night a traveler is clearly written by a seasoned writer and perhaps best read by a seasoned reader. It is meta-writing that results in meta-reading, with the main character always referred to as "you". We are offered not just examples of different writing styles, and different book styles, but a clear, almost pedantic look at what devices can be and are used in writing. Later, this translates into the styles of reading, the whole think culminating in the question "What do you w ...more

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