If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Alas, another Italian letdown. How hard is it to find a nice Italian book to make a nice Italian lady feel nice about Italy?! Very difficult, apparently!

I was all ready to love this book (with the giant caveat that I hate fiction... yes, I know). I like post-modern gimmickry. It even felt a little commedia all'italiana in vibe, with fourth wall-breaking, bittersweet feelings, and general intellectual whimsicalness. It felt like it could have been C'eravamo tanto amati (one of my favorite Italian films), in book form.

And for the first few chapters, it was. The structure of the book is, well, yes, a funny post-modern gimmick. Chapters alternate between a second-person narrative following you, the Reader, as you fall in love with the Other Reader; and chapters of various books that you, the Reader, read in an attempt to actually read If on a winter's night a traveler. Is your brain a pretzel thinking about that? Good. That's the point, and it's very fun, and, yes, it gave me something I like to call “hot brain feeling”.

But then I just lost interest. Once the originality of the premise wore off (which was around halfway through the book for me), it just started to feel frustrating and tedious. The book is also a giant meta commentary on a particular type of 1970s/1980s left-wing intellectual from Italy (as C'eravamo tanto amati is, also), and usually I can be down with a little nostalgizing of recent Italian political/cultural history. But here, it just felt soooooo booooring and all the Readerverse characters felt sooooooo pretentious.

The quest to find an Italian book I actually like continues, with much sadface. :(