[1]

You are about to read a review of Italo Calvino’s 1979 novel, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought from your mind.

[If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller]

The bustling world above fades into nothing but a whisper as you descend the writhing stairs to deep below the Earth’s rotten, molten crust. You are released from your downwards spiral unto the subterranean aedeficium of today, a sweet labyrinth without a minotaur, and a place you find yourself serially returning to with the dual predicament of having both too much and not enough time to spare. You breathe in the scent of fresh paper and celebrate your arrival at Boffins Books. Immediately, you ascertain your reason for being here as being beyond a regular routine, indiscriminate browsing — rather, you have come here for the sake of administering a very discriminate selection.

Today, you are here to buy a book, on the sole condition that it be a book which you have never heard of, by an author who you regard similarly. And so you wander haphazardly past Books You Haven’t Read, Books You Needn’t Read, Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category of Books Read Before Being Written, Books You Would Read But Your Days Are Numbered, and, most certainly, Books Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You’ve Read Them Too.

You are charmed by the varying colours of the pages, by the contrasting spines rubbing up against each other as they nestle together on their shelves. However, despite it all, in the very corner of the room, hidden amongst piles of vintage fiction, you find that you cannot resist the call of a novel bearing the name, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. You pick it up, you turn the book over, you immediately like the fact that it isn’t a thick book — only 240 pages or thereabouts. The cover, which prominently features a train, a table and a still-smoking cigarette, now faces away from you as you indulge in that tantalising reading of the blurb. Ah yes — you cannot help but think to yourself — I have found my book.

[2]

But what sort of book is this?

We follow a Reader, one who himself acquires and begins to read Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Unfortunately, the Reader’s reading is interrupted by a printing error which sends him back to the bookstore in search of the complete novel, but which ultimately results in increasingly bizarre encounters with ten different novels which always, and for unforeseen reasons, become unreadable when they are at their most interesting. We alternate between these novel fragments and the meta-narrative of our Reader’s search for the true novel, and by extension — the authentic reading experience.

Our Reader is joined by an excellent cast of colourful characters. Another reader, a beautiful Other Reader, Ludmilla, as well as her sister Lotaria, Professor Uzii Tuzii of the last living-dead language Cimmerian (or was it Cimbrian?), the elderly Mr Cavadagna of the publishing house, the artist Ernio who has taught himself how not to read, the tormented Irish author Sinnas Flannery, and perhaps, behind it all, Ermes Marana — the adventurer-translator who knows not a word of the texts he seeks to translate but who, with prophetic zeal -– dreams of proliferating a world of literature inseparable from Apocrypha and illusion.

[Outside The Town of Malbork]

Such were the many elements of the novel which drew you in — which made it one of those novels which you can proudly say you devoured voraciously and finished in only a handful of days.

And then once you had finished it, you made the terrible mistake of saying to a group of friends, “I’ve just finished this excellent book which I unconditionally recommend, so much so, in fact, that I’m thinking of writing a Woroni review of it.” 

[3]

So, you are to write a review — but how? You’ve never written a review of a book before, so perhaps it would be best to consult with those who have. You decide to turn to academia. Surely, you say to yourself, surely someone will have articulated in perfect English precisely what I felt when I read this novel!

But this turn to academia, almost as suddenly as it was taken, you realise was foolhardy — was undoubtedly a misstep. Why? Because as you read through one article, and then through another, you fail to understand what anything anyone is saying means at all!

Take this passage for example:

“Underlying Calvino’s metafictional agenda is faith in a literary cognitive potency, which thrives regardless of epochal interrogation of the written word’s subject-object terminal nexus. Calvino’s deposition of modernity’s proclivity unto scepticism and silence in favour of a neohumanistic, voluptuous array of writing’s signatures engages multiplicity and density in intellectual human activity, one which strives for a complete vision of existence as an aesthetic being.”

[On the Steep Slope]

It’s hopeless! It’s no good! Certainly, some out there can decipher the intended meaning to be communicated, but you are certainly not one of them.

However, you seem to remember having had grand ideas as you read the novel, so perhaps all you need to do is reread, and as you are rereading and re-remembering those ideas, you need only write them down so as to re-re-remember them.

[4]

And so you reread. And what ideas do you find?

Lotaria invents a machine which allows her to ‘read’ a novel by looking at the frequency of words. This reading of Lotaria’s is denounced by Calvino, who terms it pseudo-scientific, ideologically motivated, devalued, and degenerate. But how much in common does Lotaria’s way of reading have with the way that so many of us do our weekly readings? What proximal relationship exists between Lotaria’s machine and those LLM systems that probabilistically guess which word comes after the next?

And what about Ludmilla’s reading? That reading which Calvino presents as the most pure, ideal and perfect — a reading which is interesting! This beautiful Other Reader reads because she likes to read and nothing else!

What of the Reader’s reading? Aha — now you appear to have it! The Reader strives for the impossible — the complete understanding, that satisfying ending which imposes upon the multiplicity of novels before him something generic and intelligible.

Perhaps this is your angle?

Textual misreading is bad living. To read badly is to live badly is to interpret incorrectly, which is to enforce a single rule of interpretation that governs all that is.

You could write about how Calvino refrains from pursuing the one exhaustive book, how he instead tends towards partial images inscribed at the end of increasingly concentric circles. 

There is not one story to be written, but many.

Do not endeavour to write the one, true book — for any such attempt entails only failure and frustration. Instead, write many books, and look to pursue the whole through its parts ad infinitum — in the style of Calvino, Flannery and Marana.

You collapse into your own hands. After poring over the chapters and text of the book, you have very quickly found yourself encumbered with too many ideas. But isn’t this always the case? Either nothing at all or everything all at once!

[Around an Empty Grave]

You once more despair. This is no good! How are you to write a review of a novel such as this? A novel which itself contains ten other novels? A novel which you enjoyed with all of your heart, a novel with so very much to say about reading and readers, about books and authors, about means and ends and revolutions and lovers and metaphysics and telephones and….

And despite all of this you don’t even know where to begin.

You turn inwards — you focus on a single thing — just one:

Why am I writing this? What is it that I am trying to say by writing this?

[5]

You are about to finish reading a review of Italo Calvino’s 1979 novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. The novel is one that I very much enjoyed reading. In addition, it says a lot about so many things which matter so very much to so very many of us. If you have the time, and I really implore you to find it if you don’t — please read Italo Calvino’s 1979 novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller.