I’ve wanted to read Italo Calvino’s ‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller‘ for a long time. I finally got around to reading it.
The story starts with the reader going to a bookshop and getting Italo Calvino’s latest book ‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller’. The reader reads it and it is interesting. A mysterious guy gets down at a railway station in the middle of nowhere and waits for someone. Someone is supposed to come there and exchange suitcases with him. But that guy doesn’t turn up. It looks like a classic crime novel by James Cain or Raymond Chandler. But after some point, the pages in the novel start repeating. So our reader goes to the bookshop after that and tries to return this book and get a new copy. But other copies in the bookshop have the same problem. What happens after this, and the adventures that this reader has forms the rest of the story.
There is good news and bad news. The good news first. The book started very well. It was exceptional. It was gripping and made me want to turn the page and find out what happened next. The chapters alternated between the reader’s viewpoint and a chapter from the novel which was very interesting. The story was written in the second person, which must have been very rare at the time Calvino published the novel. There were many beautiful passages in the book. This is all the good news.
Now the bad news. Calvino goes overboard with what he starts at the beginning of the book (at the end of the first chapter the pages are repeating, at the end of the second chapter pages are missing and there are blank pages etc.) and after some point, the book becomes so outrageous that it sinks under its own weight and under the weight of Calvino’s own intelligence and experimentation. After some point I found the going very hard but I still ploughed my way through the book. But when I reached the halfway point of the book, I gave up. I decided that I’ve had enough. I flipped through the second part of the book, and it didn’t seem to improve much, it was worse, though there were still beautiful passages in it, and when I reached the end I read the last few pages.
I got ‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller’ because I loved the title. It was very atmospheric and evoked images of a quiet village and a lonely man walking into it in the rain. We want to know what happens next. (There is an Estonian book by Rein Raud called ‘The Brother’ which evokes a similar atmosphere, but Rein Raud’s book delivers on that front.) I also loved the fact that the book was written in the second person and the author lures the reader into the story with that and makes the reader a part of the story. But when I actually read the book, it didn’t work. I felt that if the author had stayed with the atmosphere that the book evoked at the beginning, it would have been much much better. But the author tried doing too much after that and the book implodes. Atleast that is what I felt. I really wanted to like this book. I’d waited so long to read it. Readers whom I respect and admire have all raved about it. But it didn’t work for me.
I’d like to think that my reading taste is quite broad. I read all kinds of books. I like most of the books I read. And so I’m very disappointed that I couldn’t like this. I’m not one of those readers who, after reading a book, goes and finds out what other readers and reviewers and critics have said about the book, and then tailors his opinion to fit the majority opinion. Reading a book is like eating food or dessert for me. I don’t really think about other people’s opinion about a dessert (I love recommendations but my experience with the dessert is my own). I just go and try the dessert and see whether I like it or not. I read in the same way. I read a book and then see whether I like it or not. I wish things were different but unfortunately this is how it is. And though everyone is raving about this book and people are calling it Calvino’s masterpiece, I was disappointed by it. Reading it was an underwhelming experience for me. I always thought that Calvino would become one of my favourite writers. It doesn’t look like it is going to happen now.
I wonder sometimes whether as a reader, I’ve hit a wall. This has happened to me before when I studied mathematics and when I learnt new languages. When I studied mathematics in school, at some point, the teacher started teaching calculus and probability, and the difficulty level was so high suddenly that I couldn’t make the leap. I struggled through the last two years of high school and my grades crashlanded. The same thing happened with every new language I learnt. Everything will be going well and I’ll understand every word, and every grammatical construct, but at one point there will be a jump in the difficulty level, and that would be the end for me. After this happened repeatedly, I stopped learning new languages. I’m wondering now whether I’ve hit a similar wall in reading. I’m wondering whether I’ve reached the end of my evolution as a reader, and whether I can’t handle the increased complexity in a book anymore. Till now, I’ve hated the stream-of-consciousness style – ‘hate’ is probably a strong word, it is better to say that I found it challenging – but I’ve enjoyed other forms of experimentation in a book. I’ve read other books by OuLiPo writers and enjoyed them – I think Raymond Queneau’s ‘The Flight of Icarus’ is a masterpiece – but I was not able to love Calvino’s book in the same way. Should I assume now that this is the end for me, and I should just stick to books that I like and avoid experimental stuff? I don’t know what to do. I always liked trying new things, reading new kinds of books, and broadening my horizons. Thinking that this is the end is very hard for me. Let me see what the future holds. As far as Italo Calvino is concerned, I have three more books by him – a collection of essays called ‘Why Read the Classics’, a collection of Italian folktales, and a novel called ‘Cosmicomics’. I’ve read some essays from ‘Why Read the Classics’ and liked them. So I think I’ll like that book. Italian folktales sounds wonderful. A collection of folktales can’t go wrong, can it? What is the worst that can happen? As far as ‘Cosmicomics’ is concerned, I’m expecting that the first 20 or 50 pages will be very good, like ‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller’, and then it will all go to hell. So I’ll look forward to reading those 20 to 50 pages. After that no more Calvino for me.
Sharing some of my favourite parts from the book. (I know you are laughing at me now. This is too many favourite passages from a book which I say I didn’t like. This is life, and this is how it is.)
“It’s not that you expect anything in particular from this particular book. You’re the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclusion you have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even international affairs. What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn’t serious.”
“For a couple of pages now you have been reading on, and this would be the time to tell you clearly whether this station where I have got off is a station of the past or a station of today; instead the sentences continue to move in vagueness, grayness, in a kind of no man’s land of experience reduced to the lowest common denominator. Watch out: it is surely a method of involving you gradually, capturing you in the story before you realize it – a trap. Or perhaps the author still has not made up his mind, just as you, reader, for that matter, are not sure what you would most like to read: whether it is the arrival at an old station, which would give you a sense of going back, a renewed concern with lost times and places, or else a flashing of lights and sounds, which would give you the sense of being alive today, in the world where people today believe it is a pleasure to be alive.”
“I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in disintegration.”
“Perhaps this diary will come to light many, many years after my death, when our language will have undergone who knows what transformations, and some of the words and expressions I use normally will seem outdated and of ambiguous meaning. In any case, the person who finds this diary will have one certain advantage over me: with a written language it is always possible to reconstruct a dictionary and a grammar, isolate sentences, transcribe them or paraphrase them in another language, whereas I am trying to read in the succession of things presented to me every day the world’s intentions toward me, and I grope my way, knowing that there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurks in these things. I would like this hovering of presentiments and suspicions to reach the person who reads me not as an accidental obstacle to understanding what I write, but as its very substance; and if the process of my thoughts seems elusive to him who, setting out from radically changed mental habits, will seek to follow it, the important thing is that I convey to him the effort I am making to read between the lines of things the evasive meaning of what is in store for me.”
“Reading is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead….Or that is not present because it does not yet exist, desired, feared, possible or impossible. Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be….”
“The Koran is the holy book about whose compositional process we know most. There were at least two mediations between the whole and the book: Mohammed listened to the word of Allah and dictated, in his turn, to his scribes. Once the biographers of the Prophet tell us while dictating to the scribe Abdullah, Mohammed left a sentence half finished. The scribe, instinctively, suggested the conclusion. Absently, the Prophet accepted as the divine word what Abdullah had said. This scandalized the scribe, who abandoned the Prophet and lost his faith. He was wrong. The organization of the sentence, finally, was a responsibility that lay with him; he was the one who had to deal with the internal coherence of the written language, with grammar and syntax, to channel into it the fluidity of a thought that expands outside all language before it becomes word, and of a word particularly fluid like that of a prophet. The scribe’s collaboration was necessary to Allah, once he had decided to express himself in a written text. Mohammed knew this and allowed the scribe the privilege of concluding sentences; but Abdullah was unaware of the powers vested in him. He lost his faith in Allah because he lacked faith in writing, and in himself as an agent of writing.”
“Listening to someone read aloud is very different from reading in silence. When you read, you can stop or skip sentences: you are the one who sets the pace. When someone else is reading, it is difficult to make your attention coincide with the tempo of his reading: the voice goes either too fast or too slow. And then, listening to someone who is translating from another language involves a fluctuation, a hesitation over the words, a margin of indecision, something vague, tentative. The text, when you are the reader, is something that is there, against which you are forced to clash; when someone translates it aloud to you, it is something that is and is not there, that you cannot manage to touch.”
Have you read ‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller’? What do you think of it? Which is your favourite Italo Calvino book?
I loved it!
But I enjoyed reading your review too.
Glad you liked the book, Lisa. I was hoping to like the book more, but unfortunately it was not to be. I loved the beautiful passages in it though. Loved your review of the book. Maybe I’ll read the Wikipedia page about the postmodern aspect of it, to understand it better.
I hated this one, Vishy. My book group read it years ago and we all uniformly loathed it and we are a very well read bunch.
Sorry to know that you didn’t like this one, Kim. I feel sad, but in a way I’m also glad that I’m not alone. I was hoping to like it, because I loved the title and I also loved the start of the book, but unfortunately, things didn’t go well after that.
I’m sorry this was a disappointment. I have yet to find a Calvino I like. I’m not sure I read this but they all have a similar vibe.
Sorry to know that Calvino didn’t work for you, Caroline. I really wanted yo like this book, because I loved the title and I liked the start of the book, but unfortunately, things didn’t go well. I’m hoping that his essay collection ‘Why Read the Classics’ will be better (because it is nonfiction) and I’m also hoping that his Italian Folktales might be more enjoyable. Hoping to dip into them at some point.
I have to admit that, although it is probably his best-known work, it is not my favourite Calvino either. I’d recommend trying his Marcovaldo book -a series of short stories/vignettes all featuring the same character, a working-class man Marcovaldo and his family.
Thank you for the recommendation, Marina. Will add the Marcovaldo book to my list and will try to read it one of these days. I really wanted to like If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (such a beautiful title!), but unfortunately it didn’t work for me.
I loved this book but I do remember, above all, being drawn to the earlier chapters. It’s been many years since I read it, and it was many years before I read another book by him; the others I’ve read didn’t strike me as the same. I think you might like shorter ones like Invisible Cities (or Difficult Loves) even if you didn’t like Winter’s and certainly I’d say the folktales will be enjoyable for you regardless of this experience.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, Marcie. The early chapters were definitely better. I loved the first chapters of the book and was expecting the rest of the book to be like that. Unfortunately, it was not to be. Thanks for the recommendations. I have his Italian Folktales somewhere. If I’m able to get that, I’ll try to read that next.