If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

I picked the worst possible time to read this book. This is a book I've been meaning to read for years, and while I didn't exactly dislike it, I enjoyed it considerably less than I expected. I think that part of the problem was the circumstances - this is a book that demands your full attention and availability. It is a book to be read with time, and while it took me a week to get through it, I still felt that I was rushing because I wanted to start reading something else.

The premise behind this book is brilliant - the story starts as you, the reader, begin to read Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. After reading the first chapter, however, you realize that there is something wrong with the book: it contains nothing but the first chapter again and again. You go back to the bookstore to return it, and you are told that yes, there was a problem at the publisher, and yours is not the first complain. The first chapter you read, it turns out, doesn't even belong to Calvino's book, but to a novel by a Polish author. You were getting engaged in the story and you want to see where it goes, so instead of exchanging it for a proper copy of Calvino's novel, you get a copy of that novel by a Polish author. You soon find out that the novel you bought is in no way related to that first chapter you read, but you start reading it anyway, and once again you get drawn into the story, only to find out that, after the first chapter, all the pages of the book are blank.

And so on and so forth. The reader reads a series of novel beginnings, and for some reason something always stops him from reading the rest of the novel. The chapters with these beginnings are alternated with chapters with a main plot, in which the reader - you, as Calvino addresses you - tries to discover what is behind this succession of incomplete novels.

Now, I am a big fan of traditional storytelling - of stories with beginnings, middles and ends (though not necessarily in that order) - and experimentation doesn't always work for me. But I was very much drawn to this book because, as an avid reader, I love stories about storytelling itself, and stories with other stories inside them, like Russian Dolls. The idea of a story in which the reader is always left in suspension, eagerly seeking the conclusion of the stories he's being told, reminded me of Scheherazade and of the Arabian Nights.

But of course, everything depends on how this concept is executed. I've had proof in the past that Italo Calvino is an excellent writer, but one of the reasons why this book did not work for me at this particular point in time is the fact that most of the several beginnings of stories completely failed to captivate me. I found most of them too vague, too diffuse, and I was just not interested in finding out what was going to happen next. That alone made it impossible for me to relate to what the reader - me - was supposed to be feeling.

Plus, in all of those story beginnings I remained aware that what I was reading wasn't really a story, but the experience of someone, a character in a novel, reading a story. This sense of double distance made it impossible for me to get involved, and I realize that this is a part of what Calvino was trying to achieve, but it still alienated me somewhat. Also, there was the fact that I knew that the stories weren't going to be concluded. That too kept me from making the effort to get involved. And this is where the emotional availability I spoke of comes in. Whenever I start reading a book - and I believe this is true for almost everyone almost all the time - I am generally not immediately drawn in. I have to make an effort, which is both intelecual and emotional, to get into the novel. It takes longer with some books than with others, but it is only after that, when familiarity has been achieved, that I truly begin to enjoy the book. Well, a book like this demands that this initial effort is made again and again, and that was more than I could do at this point.

All in all, this is an interesting book, and there were some parts I really enjoyed, but I don't think it is for everyone. If you are a compulsive reader, though, it is likely that you will recognize yourself in some of the character. The book also contains some interesting musings on reading and writing, and caricatures of both writers and different types of readers.

There was a little story, or rather, a little beginning of a story, that was told at the very end of the second to last chapter. That one did get me interested, and I was truly frustrated not to see it continuing. It made me realize how reading this book could have been if only I had felt that way about all the stories.

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