If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

by Italo Calvino

Flannery’s crisis had aroused the two rival factions of Apocryphal Power and, with opposing hopes, they had unleashed their informers in the valleys around the novelist’s chalet. The Wing of Shadow people, knowing that the great fabricator of assembly-line novels was no longer able to believe in his tricks, had convinced themselves that his next novel would mark the switch from cheap and relative bad faith to essential and absolute bad faith, the masterpiece of falsity as knowledge, and would therefore be the book they had been seeking for such a long time. The Wing of Light followers, on the other hand, thought that from the crisis of such a professional in falsehood only a cataclysm of truth could be born, and this is what they believed the writer’s diary of which there was so much talk would be. . . . At the rumor, circulated by Flannery, that I had stolen an important manuscript from him, each side identified the manuscript with the object of its search, and both set out to find me, the Wing of Shadow causing the hijacking of the plane, the Wing of Light that of the elevator. . . .