IF On A Winters Night A Traveller

If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, outside the town of Marbork, leaning from the steep slope, without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow, without fear of wind or vertigo, in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon, around an empty grave- What story down there awaits its end?-he asks, anxious to hear the story.

Calvino paints a myriad grid of interlacing story lines, mistaken identity, fraudulence, plagiary and parody in several different colours, each more dazzling and vivid than the next. Its a virtuoso pastiche of not only the cheap airline novel - in which ourselves as the 'reader' are passively dragged from situation to situation, clandestine group to group, along the way falling in love, tripping over ourselves and repeatedly losing sight of our original objective,- but it is also a profound meditation on authorship and multiple interpretations. It could be seen, given its vantage point (1980), of foretelling the decade of Deconstructionism which was to spawn endless fields of critical debate. One scene which ingeniously parodies this is the chapter after the reading of 'without wind or vertigo' in which the professor and his students instantly submit the text they have just heard to a critical dissection, attaching tags and labels each more ludicrous than the last to the authors intentions, 'at this point they throw open the discussion, Events characters, settings,impressions are thrust aside to make room for the general concepts'

"the polymorphic-pervese sexuality.." "the laws of a market economy..." "the homologies of the signifying structures"

Calvino's thoughts upon the role of the reader are made fairly transparent in his choice of heroine 'the OTHER reader' (no doubt to many feminists chagrin) Ludmilla, who see's in the text- not the author as an auteur, not the context he wrote in or his sublimated political, social or otherwise- but the possibility of immersion, of abandoning oneself nakedly to the written word and its power and admires 'novels that bring me...into a world where everything is precise,concrete,specific. I feel a special satisfaction in knowing that things are made in theat certain fashion and not otherwise..." In a move of ingenuity then Calvino crafts a novel of such fluctuations and fragmentation that his heroine would most likely abandon it upon discovering the first change of narrative voice to second person, and the intentional fluidity of the characters, who seem to give up the fight against the rapids that determine their course. This is of course meant to signify the experience of the reader, faced with the novel, so despite the impression Calvino crafts of our autonomy he is in fact throughout dictating our thoughts and intentions- an experience so unfamiliar and eccentric that it is at first quite unnerving. The stories that partition the narrative of the reader, or in reality give meaning to the exterior narrative that bookends them, are (with the exception of two) each distinct and vividly crafted tales that if expanded upon would surely justify and satisfy separate publication and expansion into novels. BUt this is precisely the glory of this most escher-like narrative maze, that we are every second chapter drawn into these immaculately rendered worlds only to be rudely interrupted and withdrawn at the moment of highest tension. It's a book which collects stolen moments and almost mocks how easily transfixed us fickle readers can be, he plays with our sense of anticipation, expectancy and desires like a chess-player arranging his pawns. The idea of the incipit lies at the core of 'if on a winters night...' as the author exposes how a book of multiple beginning's can sustain the awe and vulnerability the reader encounters on starting a novel, which is often nullified as they proceed to the Middle and End of their journey.

There are so many more paragraphs i feel i need to unleash to fully give voice to all the sensations i traversed when reading this book, but i'm not sure i will be able to ever quite exhaust the level of themes that are deducible from it, it is in short a triumph. There is one paragraph towards the end , from the dialogue held between Reader's, which i believe to exhibit one of the most acute understanding of The Readers experience yet demonstrated in print by The Writer, who we could reasonably expect to be as cut off from such matters as a CEO of a company is from the discussions held between his corporations secretaries:

"Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in the way that reading proves fruitful for me. 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 intinerary 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. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, i manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which i can never exhaust."

This is a phenomenon i went through several times in the course of reading Calvino's novel, so much so that chapters seemed to take longer to conclude than some more throwaway material as idea's he minutely touched on snowballed in my mind so that they began to obscure and cloud everything else on the page. An example which it took the longest to resume reading once i had considered, was the suggestion (small though it was) by the 'true author?' Silas Flannery that his next novel should simply be reduced to a list of words and their frequency of appearance from which the reader would guess the plot.