If on a Winter's Night a Traveller... (Book Review)

Okay so promise kept, I am reviewing a book I just finished a few days ago, the postmodern novel from 1979 by Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveller. The book -unlike most I'd imagine- is notable for its desire to highlight the artificial nature of what it is. It breaks the fourth wall inherently from the first few lines and continues to do so with abandon: You are the protagonist and you have a story that lies within this story, and many after it. The book inspired the David Mitchell novel Cloud Atlas (which I have reviewed here) and is recognised as one of the greatest pieces of Italian literature of the previous century.

The novel takes us through the reading process, a process we're all familiar with I'm sure, but to see it written down for us at the start of a novel is quite a shell game to play. The narrative revolves around us buying Italo Calvino's new novel If on a winter's night a traveller, and commencing to read as readers often do, which provides a comical glimpse at the unconscious mind when performing such day-to-day tasks as reading. (Have you left the stove on? Sure the front door's locked? Need the toilet beforehand?) It allows us to see how writers write simultaneously as Calvino is able to use his omnipresent voice to highlight the difficulties that the author (himself) went through, in order to write the book we are about to read. He highlights the philosophical side of writing and the idea that the first-person "I" as used by writers is designed in part to include elements of the author's personality. He denotes the very functions of the fictional writing style as if he is telling us how the story has been constructed.

Jittery at first, the novel smooths out its learning curve and we find ourselves in the first of the unfinished stories within the work. In my Cloud Atlas review I included a list of the story halves so as to make the structure appear more accessible and I will do the same for this book, because it's only when seeing it pan out before you, do you really understand the structure:

Chapter 1
If on a winter's night a traveller
Chapter 2
Outside the town of Malbork
Chapter 3
Leaning from the steep slope
Chapter 4
Without fear of wind or vertigo
Chapter 5
Looks down in the gathering shadow
Chapter 6
In a network of lines that enlace
Chapter 7
In a network of lines that intersect
Chapter 8
On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon
Chapter 9
Around an empty grave
Chapter 10
What story down there awaits its end?
Chapter 11
Chapter 12

I hope the list aids you, but if not allow me to explain. As you start to read the first story, you find it ceases mid-page, a printing error has occurred and so you set out in Chapter 2 to find the rest of the book. You meet a woman named Ludmilla, whom you find has also experienced the misfortune of an unfinished book. The publisher however has seen even bigger problems, the authors' names are getting mixed up, and the novel started was in fact not If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino, but instead was the text belonging to Outside the town of Malbork by a completely different author!

The puzzles increase and over time plot lines are abandoned in pursuit of the next unfinished prose, ravenous reader that you are, and so you seek and travel and hop and jump and explore all over the world until you reach the terminus having not finished a single novel. The point at which you realise that despite all of these stories and all of these grand heroes and heroines writ into the pages, in reality, there was only one protagonist and he was in all of them: He was you.

The book is many things and at the same time it is a single thing, the epicentre of a black hole almost. Is it a crime thriller? A dystopia? A love story? A mystery? Or is it the narrative that we all live and breathe in our lives, not the life of a reader, but of the characters we visualise and live within even for a short while, the books we enjoy and feel inspired by, that make us?

Reading the work provides two perspectives that I touched upon in my article on why writers write. The former is that of the reader, why you read and how we all read, the methods, the distractions, styles and motivations so vast. But more importantly is the latter I feel, not because I write myself, but rather because for all who read the book it will always spark lucidity with the process for those who haven't engaged with it seriously. The book truly makes you consider the writer at the other end of the metaphorical bridge that writing is and how they think, how they breathe life into narratives.

But the best thing about If on a winter's night a traveller... is not the style or even the philosophy behind it, but rather the sheer skill Calvino employs when switching to the stories embedded within the chapters. The voices chatter lifelike, the narratives are truly gripping (just a shame they're never finished!) and perhaps the greatest strength, the fact that you never feel remote when you go into the 'proper' tales; they're no different than any other novel you'd happen across on a shelf in the local bookshop, which makes this Inception-esque journey into stories within your story a perfect delight for a week's reading. A book to read at some point in your life, even if only to marvel at the impressive linguistic footwork- and what a performance it is!

If On a Winter's Night a Traveller (1979)