If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler in Read a book from each country

Jul 01, 2012 Duc Hoang rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, reviewed, vietnamese-translation

Khi tôi không còn đọc được nữa, hãy đọc cho tôi Nếu một đêm đông có người lữ khách.

8 likes · Like · see review

Apr 23, 2013 mussolet rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: type-short-stories, g-magical-realism, language-german, 2021-sorted, 2024-shelf-read-question

Crossposted to 238 books in 238 days.
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This is easily the most annoying four-star-book I have ever read.

I'm not a fan of the second-person-viewpoint, and every other chapter in this book shows me why. It starts of with "you" going into a bookstore to buy Italo Calvino's newly published "If on a winter's night a traveller". If the described scenario doesn't apply to me, it will throw me out of the story. And it started right there, I didn't go into a shop because I wanted this newly pu Crossposted to 238 books in 238 days.
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This is easily the most annoying four-star-book I have ever read.

I'm not a fan of the second-person-viewpoint, and every other chapter in this book shows me why. It starts of with "you" going into a bookstore to buy Italo Calvino's newly published "If on a winter's night a traveller". If the described scenario doesn't apply to me, it will throw me out of the story. And it started right there, I didn't go into a shop because I wanted this newly published book; I bought it more than 30 years after publication because a newspaper told me to, and I had never heard of Calvino before.
It doesn't matter to me that the "you" might mean someone else than me; if I'm not being told from the beginning, I won't assume such a thing. And if I discover in the third chapter that I'm male, and really intrigued by a vividly described woman, it puts me off.
(There is also the problem that such a style, even if it works, is subsequently copied in an awful lot of reviews. [See also Dan Brown's recent publication and the creative reviews done for that.] But I won't go into that here.)

The other annoying thing was the author patronizing the reader about what his expectations or impressions or thoughts must be in this very moment. The descriptions were never accurate, in most cases I just thought "Please stop this and write in a normal way."

Even more annoyingly, those patronizing second-person chapters also contain a lot of interesting thoughts about books and reading, and I found myself agreeing with the author after I'd gotten over my annoyance.
My particular favourite happens right at the beginning, when the author describes the process of determining which book to buy, because I did exactly the same thing yesterday.

And then there are the other chapters. They're unlinked, like beginnings of books, and the reader is never told how they will end. Annoyingly enough, though written in different styles, I loved almost every one of them. Thankfully I've read enough books to know where I have to look to find something with a similar style, but I'd really love to have those ending. On the whole though, they feel more like unfinished short stories than like things that really leave you hanging, so I think it's alright not to know.
There's also a storyline connecting all of these beginnings, but as it happens in the annoying chapters, I didn't get into it that much.

Overall, I wish it had been less annoying, but nevertheless this will end up on my favourites shelf. Despite being annoying. ...more

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