Review: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

This is a book for readers. Italo Calvino slips into your mind and examines every part of your relationship with books, showing you that you are connected with countless other readers through our mirrored experience in reading. 

Your never-ending reading list and the comfort of your reading routine. Word frequencies, and the way word choice characterizes a work. Reading a book alone, versus reading a book with another reader, versus being read to. Reading as a metaphor for social connection. Reading as a communication with the writer. Reading as a political activity. Reading a work only in translation and wondering what is lost. Reading as a spiraling activity:

If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it.

One of the most unique of these, that I have felt but had never seen expressed so evocatively, is the difference between reading as a reader and reading as a writer or editor: 

Now you understand Ludmilla’s refusal to come with you; you are gripped by the fear of having also passed over to “the other side” and of having lost that privileged relationship with books which is peculiar to the reader: the ability to consider what is written as something finished and definitive, to which there is nothing to be added, from which there is nothing to be removed.

I choose “the other side”, that privilege of the editor or the writer. The ability to see the seams of a work, to see what could be tightened, that makes reading more enjoyable to me, not less. But I am not immune to a little sentimental reflection on those days gone by when every book was a wonder, every scientific paper a flawless addition to the literature.

These meditations on reading, all told in second-person, are interspersed with segments of lost novels, all told in first person. The overall plot that ties together this ode to books is that due to publishing house mishaps, political strife and various other interruptions, you, the reader, can never finish any one of these books despite desperately wanting to. The lost fragments range from the creative and thought-provoking to the cliche and boring. Portrayal of women left much to be desired. Portrayal of political topics was also disappointing; when writing on this vein, Calvino reads like any other disillusioned twentieth century socialist. I mostly found myself awaiting the next frame story, for when you, the reader, or I, the reader, could next discover what aspect of our relationship with books would be probed next.