I may be daydreaming about a reasoned, thematic reading plan, but this summer so far has been the Summer of Random — be it reading or otherwise. From One Thousand and One Nights to The Turn of the Screw, from Matthew Lewis to Arthur C. Clarke, anything goes — which might well be the perfect mindset to read If on a winter’s night a traveler, Calvino’s mishmash-of-novels novel. The book is unified around the figure of a Reader who, after purchasing the latest Calvino and reading a few pages, realizes he has been sold a defective copy of the book. Due to a printing mistake, the book he has in hand (not a Calvino) stops at page 32. Our Reader returns to the bookstore for an exchange, unknowingly starting on a quest that will have him begin reading a great many books, without ever being able to go past the first chapter or so. If on a winter’s night then alternates chapters of the Reader’s own story and the literary fragments he reads on his journey. While each new novel contains signs of the previous stories (a name, an object, an image…), they are all ostensibly different, ranging geographically from Japan to the fictional Eastern European country of Cimmeria, thematically from thrillers to psychological fiction, and have been authored by at least three different writers (very likely more — and that’s without the fiction-writing machines and unfaithful translators which were also involved). As for the Reader’s story, while it is unified by the presence of the Reader and that of a few other protagonists, it also fluctuates between genres: love, detective, adventure, spy…
Calvino was a respected fiction critic in addition to being a writer, When he wrote If on a winter’s night, he was struggling with the edicts of the “new” French critics (Calvino had lived and worked in France for many years, and has shown a certain defiance with the more traditional literary forms; as for the Nouveau Roman, Tel Quel, structuralism and such, I will not expound here, though I certainly need to explain all of this to myself at some point. Not my favorite subject of all times, I’m afraid, sorry St Barthes et al.). If on a winter’s night is a very self-conscious attempt to talk about plot, a notion writers were supposed to leave behind as trivial and primitive (I caricature, bear with me…). This self-consciousness results in several mannerisms I found frankly annoying, for instance Calvino’s insistence on using the second-person point of view (which reminded me more of the choose-your-own-adventure books of my childhood than of Bright Lights Big City; in other words, it was as unsuccessful for me). This distance between reader and Reader might well have been intentional (even when we’re reading over the Reader’s shoulder, there are notes of his and the writer’s presence all over the text: “the page you’re reading should convey this violent contact“, for instance, or in what starts as the voice of a character in a story-within-the-story, “perhaps I am thinking this only now, or it is only you, Reader, who are thinking it“).
Despite these criticisms, the book remains a pleasure: no matter how tortured Calvino might have been about it, he still is a fantastic storyteller, and he cares deeply about writing. Delirious situations, slippery characterizations, even the occasional bout of stilted writing could not keep me from wanting to know what happens next. Moreover, the passion Calvino brings to his discussion about truth and illusion in art, his pleasure in playing hide-and-seek with readers — these are highly contagious. I reread The Baron in the Trees right after If on a winter’s night (admittedly a more childish book than I remembered, but still a fun read). While I found the same simple pleasure in it, it also made me realize how much more If on a winter’s night had to say, and to ask. Ludmilla*, the “Other Reader” in the book, says it when she explains that “authors are never incarnated in individuals of flesh and blood, they exist (…) only in published pages — the living and the dead both are there always ready to communicate (…) in the fickle, carefree relations one can have with incorporeal persons”. I don’t know that all my relations with authors are “fickle and carefree“, but to me, Calvino is at his best right there, in playfulness.
* on a completely unrelated note, I found that the most potentially interesting characters in both Calvino books were the female “leads”, who he perplexingly keeps at arms’ length and doesn’t develop.