By Italo Calvino

Three-Word Summary: Reading about reading

Rating: 4/5

You are about to read a book review of ‘If on a winter’s night a traveler‘ by Italo Calvino.

Originally written in Italian back in 1979, this book is about reading books. The main character is you, the reader, who spends the entirety of the narrative trying to finish reading the book.

This is because every alternative chapter is the first chapter of other unfinished novels that all happen to cut off right at the point of climax.

As it turns out, this is due to a complex plot involving a rogue translator, a floundering author, a collapsing publishing house, a corrupt foreign government and a beautiful Other Reader named Ludmilla, who you eventually fall in love with.

The ten unfinished novels scattered throughout the book are each unique and equally bizarre. It isn’t until the end that you realize that the titles of each of these works fit together to form a complete sentence, that is itself the beginning to another incomplete work.

Calvino’s masterpiece stands as a landmark in meta-fiction and borderlines on absurdity. It didn’t surprise me at all when fellow-author David Mitchell said that this work influenced his novel Cloud Atlas, which I also recently read.

If on a winter’s night a traveler is one of those books, which you aren’t always sure exactly what is happening or why, but it’s immediately obvious that it part of the brilliance of the piece.