If on a winter's night a traveler
by Italo Calvino
The recap
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, the book informs you, so you settle in, adjust the lamp and start. But after one chapter the story breaks off: a binding error has filled your copy with the wrong pages. You return to the bookshop to find the rest, meet another reader with the same problem, and set off on a chase that hands you the opening of an entirely different novel, which also stops just as it gets interesting. Calvino alternates chapters about you, the Reader, with ten separate first chapters, each written in a different style and tradition and attributed to a different author. Behind the interruptions lurk unreliable translators, literary forgers, censors and publishers, all tangled in a conspiracy around the simple act of reading. Playful and philosophical in equal measure, the book is a celebration of storytelling and a sly inquiry into why we read, what we expect from a book, and what happens when those expectations are deliberately thwarted.
Why read it
For readers who love books about books, and for anyone curious how far a novel can bend its own rules and still be a delight.
Fun facts
- 01
It was first published in Italian in 1979 as Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, and William Weaver's English translation followed in 1981.
- 02
The book contains ten different novel openings, each with its own plot, mood, style and fictional author, and each cut off at a moment of suspense.
- 03
Much of the frame story is written in the second person, which makes whoever is holding the book its protagonist.
- 04
Weaver's translation has drawn scholarly attention of its own, including a 2015 study comparing the English version with the Polish one.
