Discussion - Week Three - If on a winter's night a traveller - Ch. 8 - 12

[Jim]

This discussion covers Chapter 8 thru 12, page 169 – 260
Conclusions/Book as a whole

[Stefan]

of all the ways I expected the novel to end, the Last 2 chapters were a emotional rollercoaster and I cannot recount the times I said what the f*** out loud

I need some more time to process

[Jim]

Stefan wrote: "of all the ways I expected the novel to end, the Last 2 chapters were a emotional rollercoaster and I cannot recount the times I said what the f*** out loud

I need some more time to process"

Calvino takes us wherever he wants to, and he does this so well that even though we know he's leading us around at will, in the end we say "thank you master, may we have another?"

I recommend his work with three thumbs up!

Difficult Loves is a favorite, as is Invisible Cities.

[Zadignose]

I've got Difficult Loves waiting rather impatiently on my shelf. I thought Baron in the Trees was also remarkable.

Meanwhile, I'm sure there's a heck of a lot more to say, but I'm busy as always.

I wanted to comment, among other things, on the fact that I remembered the story of "Around an empty grave," and yet I couldn't quite believe until visiting it again that it was from this book. I had imagined I had somehow misattributed a Borges story. Anyway, I think Borges' influence is apparent in many parts of If On A Winter's Night... (including that one about the mirrors, etc.). But this time I also thought that the scene of the protagonist encountering another rider across a canyon, traveling in parallel, reminded me of Tartar Steppe. And then there's something of Pedro Páramo lingering about it all as well. Maybe because they all deal with certain archetypes, which also express that "uncanny" familiarity.

A confluence of Brain Pain style associations?

[Lily]

Zadignose wrote: "I've got Difficult Loves waiting rather impatiently on my shelf. I thought Baron in the Trees was also remarkable...."

Difficult Loves is one that can be used to disturb (or confirm) one's assumptions about love a single story or two at a time. It is many years now since I read it, but remains one of my more memorable books -- not for specifics, but for a sense of the human condition. Don't necessarily wait for time for the entire book before allowing it to escape from that shelf to your hands and eyes and thoughts, Zadignose.

Besides the Invisible Cities (a book I can leave lying around to pick up and enjoy in short excursions to a city or two), another Calvino that is especially memorable to me is the short story "La Poubelle Agréée" in The Road to San Giovanni, "the garbage," a story about what we collect and discard.

I also like his non-fiction, especially Six Memos For The Next Millennium , but also The Uses of Literature. I really did hope having If On... being read here would mean that I would get to it, but the book only made it off the shelf, not into my time right now.

[mkfs]

I kinda forgot about this book after I finished it. The last couple of chapters just didn't do it for me.

The abrupt incarceration in a third-world prison; the layers of conspiracy that disappear when it really matters (hey, how's about a little springing-me-from-jail, eh guys?); the convenient offer of freedom in exchange for obtaining a book; the detente between two nations whose only apparent foreign or domestic policy is the banning of books; the sudden realization that You wants to marry the female character that we still seem to know nothing about.

I realize the framing story (if it could be called that) had no clear direction, but this was all a bit feverish.


I remember trying to read more Calvino back when I first read If on a winter's night, and losing interest in that shortly after starting Cosmicomics. Invisible Cities was good, though; I should really read that again.

[Zadignose]

I haven't finished Cosmicomics, and it's the only Calvino work that disappointed me, mainly because I thought the first story was excellent, and the next somewhat intriguing, but then the trend seemed towards a continuing exercise that was progressively less fulfilling.

As for the end of this book, I found it quite fine, and now I can't imagine it otherwise. The narrative of Reader and Other Reader is an artifice that strings the other elements together, and the book generally eschews the notion of a book that is more satisfying in its development and conclusion than in its incipit. It maintains the tantalizing promise and mystery for as long as it can without resolution. The ending is absurd, rather abrupt, but then it is no more abrupt than the way the couple falls into bed with one another midway through the novel without reaching any kind of sense of knowing each other, and somehow without bringing any conclusion to the sense of mystery and pursuit. The sexual aspect is almost as fumbling as the scene with the mother in On the carpet of leaves... Oops, am I having sex with you? Funny how that happens, sorry about that.

The end is also not that much different from the middle in that, both times, the couple goes about what they individually enjoy, which is turning to their own sides of the bed and reading. Their relationship is almost not a relationship, but only a coincidental commonality.

But I think I would not have liked the end were there not the interpolation of the scene in the library, with each of the readers expounding a different notion about the aspects of reading that are most meaningful to them. I thought that part was great, and that it bridged well into the pat ending which admits that it is only one of the classic literary tropes to end a book, while we then find ourselves functionally back where we began.

[mkfs]

Zadignose wrote: "ut I think I would not have liked the end were there not the interpolation of the scene in the library, with each of the readers expounding a different notion about the aspects of reading that are most meaningful to them.."

Yes, that was quite good, and I tend to overlook it. I had mixed feelings reading that, like on the one hand Calvino really gets what reading is, and on the other hand he's hitting me over the head with how much he knows about how the drive to read differs.

[Zadignose]

On the spectrum from covertly-clever to overtly-clever, Calvino ranks: "Maximum Show Off." But since he can deliver the goods, I accept that as a legitimate strategy.

[Jim]

Zadignose wrote: "On the spectrum from covertly-clever to overtly-clever, Calvino ranks: "Maximum Show Off." But since he can deliver the goods, I accept that as a legitimate strategy."

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