Notes on Calvino
If on a winter’s night a traveler
I am convinced that If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979) is one of the strangest books to have ever been written.
This postmodern novel by Italo Calvino is blurry on all fronts. The plot? Solving the mystery of a misprinted novel that quickly spirals into an international book fraud conspiracy. The narrator? Well, you—in a sense.
Much of the book is narrated in the second person and parallels the experience of reading If on a winter’s night a traveler. Here’s what I mean:
The novel starts with “you” sitting down to read “Italo Calvino’s new novel”—also titled If on a winter’s night a traveler. “You” then discover missing pages, which leads “you” on a hunt to uncover the rest of the work.
The storyline, however, becomes increasingly muddy as it progresses; more and more novels—ten in total—show up unexpectedly; there seems to be some great mix-up where sections of each novel are misprinted—they’ve all bound with the wrong covers. And in between the chapters where “you” are the narrator, we get to read the first chapter of the ten separate novels in question, each with its own characters and writing style.
The plot only gets more absurd from there. “Complex” is the keyword.
If on a winter’s night a traveler is one long story of a reader (“you”) trying to read a novel titled If on a winter’s night a traveler.
It’s paradoxical to the core. Yet it’s also clear that Calvino wants to draw a parallel between you (the person in real life) and “you” (the narrator of the book). He points out the similarity and inescapable relationship between fiction and reality.
There is no fiction without life and the real world. Fiction is but a reflection of the human condition.
We love fiction—novels, poems, plays, movies, TV shows—so much because we see ourselves in the characters. We empathize with them. And at times, we crave the grandeur or contrast from our own lives that we get from stories.
Calvino’s ode to fiction and literature reflects this.
At the end of If on a winter’s night a traveler, when “you” try to find the continuation of the story about the traveler on a winter’s night, “you” are told it was never written in the first place. A novel does not always give the reader what they asked for—and neither does life.
However, we also hear that the story of the traveler was never the important part. Because all stories end in one of two ways—what lies in between is insignificant. And perhaps this goes for the stories of our own lives as well.
The seventh reader interrupts you: “Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”
You stop for a moment to reflect on these words. Then, in a flash, you decide you want to marry Ludmilla.
How we experience the journey of life seems trivial against the backdrop of time. Yet this is also what makes us appreciate existence all the more.
Italo Calvino’s stylistic choices make way for a beautiful masterpiece of literary bravura. His originality in storytelling pushes on the boundaries of literature. He also keenly understands the reader, playfully manipulating the novel’s structure to form a paradoxical narrative.
He asks us to consider ourselves just as much a part of fiction as we consider ourselves part of reality. And for that, If on a winter’s night a traveler rightfully deserves a spot upon any reader’s bookshelf.
If on a winter’s night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow 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?
