'"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If On a Winter's Night a Traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.'
You wonder what sort of book it is you're about to be reading. Is it a novel? Is it a mystery? It looks complicated and you're not sure if you're up for it, but the chill has arrived and it makes you want to wrap yourself up like a Russian doll and spill your tea on the couch because you won't put tea or book down to let them rest. You shrug and think, what the hell."
"So you've decided to read a novel, and you're here on this website, and everything looks so appealing, but wait... what's this? This book has some manner of communique beside it. This means there must be at least one other person who has read this book. But you like books about your own interests, and you just don't know if this one's up to snuff. But wait, what's that? You're the main character of this particular work? So you think, 'Well, let's give it a go. I'm never going to know what happened to me unless I buy this book.'"
Publisher Mariner Books
Publication Date 1982-10-20
Section Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Churchill P. / Kai F.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9780156439619
Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
