If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

I wanted to like this, and I can see why others do, but I couldn't get past meh. The fact that it explicitly imposes a male gaze POV on the reader probably didn't help.

A book for readers.

just like slow food, rollerblading and German, I am glad I tried this anthropological experience of a book. Just like all three, I won't repeat it, even if the promise was so amazing.

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. :(

If on a winter's night a traveler explores the experience of reading, and the place of the reader, author, text and rest of the world in said endeavor. The Reader (who is a character in the novel) finds his attempts to read the novel frustrated by incomplete texts, interrupted narrations, false translations, and other diversions, so that the novel is made up of the beginning of ten different novels as well as the Reader's own adventures with another reader and with the truth of the novel. Delightful, witty and inventive.

What is this I don't even.

Kind of like House of Leaves, but with more meat underlying the pretentiousness.

I was really into it for about the first 3/4, then put it down and couldn't finish it for like a month. Was very bored and slightly annoyed by the time I forced my way through to the end – but the ending may have redeemed it for me. I'm not entirely sure yet.

I have the impression it had layers and layers of meaning, many of which were completely lost on me, but I didn't like it enough that I'm inspired to reread and attempt to decode it.

In the end it's more a story about stories than an actual story itself, which is unsatisfying at best and actively abrasive at worst. Pleasant enough but still a bit too post-modern for me.

‰ЫПIf one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional model, perhaps four-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПAt times it seems to me that the distance between my writing and her reading is unbridgeable, that whatever I read bears a stamp of artifice and incongruity; if what I am writing were to appear on the polished surface of the page she is reading, it would rasp like a fingernail on a pane, and she would fling the book away with horror.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПBetween the book to be written and things that already exist there can be only a kind of complementary relationship: the book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness.‰Ыќ

Vi recensisco anche questo libro di Calvino, dopo Marcovaldo, che ha uno stile molto più raffinato e se vogliamo più difficile di scrittura, ma che parla di una cosa a noi tutti carissima: il piacere di leggere. Il libro è strutturato come un “gioco” che l'autore fa con il lettore, immaginando un ipotetico “lettore tipo” che comincia a leggere un romanzo, ma che per ben dieci volte non riesce a finire. Lo stile di scrittura è impeccabile, la prosa perfetta. Un'opera che incuriosisce a tal punto che farete fatica a staccare gli occhi dal libro. Questo è un romanzo dedicato al lettore, che con un'idea originalissima (cominciare, e mai portare a compimento 10 romanzi tutti diversi tra loro) pone sotto una chiave importantissima la parte che il lettore ha in un libro. Una raccomandazione: alcune persone a cui avevo consigliato questo libro lo hanno smesso dopo poche pagine perchè non avevano capito il “senso del gioco” che questo libro dà, tenete duro e arrivate in fondo, mi ringrazierete. Spero di avervi incoriusito abbastanza... e mettiamo che... una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore...