If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I wonder why this is my third Italo Calvino book and want to kick myself. I should have read this first even though his Cosmicomics is more my speed in general. Gaah!

That being said, there's something awesomely lulling and beguiling and downright charming about this book. It reads wonderfully and with such a light touch that you can't help but feel as if you're riding in a giant's careful hand, a soft but omnipresent voice telling you where you're going and what you'll be experiencing and that you really shouldn't be surprised that you're going to be dropped into one opening novel after another after another, beckoning back to previous novels and forward again, all of which are fascinating and provoking, sexual or paranoid, driving you forward until the count of ten.

That's right. Ten novels in one. That's just how Italo Calvino rolls.

But don't think this is hard to get through! Oh, no! This alway has a helpful fouth-wall-breaking hand to guide you on your way, with a constant theme of self-reference that often goes off the deep end of metaphysics but doesn't really. After all, the novel is only referring to the nature of itself.

What is its nature? It is ten novels in one, always starting, never ending... a story within a story within a story.

I love this stuff. Like, big time. Total meta-fiction, but so damn charming and carefully crafted and often dreamlike and firmly plotted, or anti-plotted, to excite and titillate and then draw back and return once more to the idea that

THIS IS NOT THE NOVEL YOU WERE LOOKING FOR. :)

You know, just like the droids.

And yet, it always is the novel you were looking for, fake within fake within fake and always turning back in upon the central theme that makes this so special: Books. Stories. Truth hidden deep, a story like an onion that can be peeled over and over and yet remains always the same.

I can honestly say I'm thrilled to have read this. It's probably the most accessible post-modern novel I've ever read and it's a comfortable and comforting ride all the way through despite the sense of uneasiness that the author intends to project upon us. Or maybe that's just me. I like labyrinths, after all. :)

Damn fine read.

View all my reviews