In Italo Calvino’s novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler, our status as a reader is taken into account in a way uncharacteristic (to say the least) of most fiction. We become a part of the story so that Calvino may utilize our position to examine the reading/writing process. Calvino summons the reader at certain points, often giving the reading a verbal cue. Since the reader is an active part of the story, we are drawn in immediately (I am tempted to use a stronger word since we are more than simply drawn in. The status he ascribes to the reader captures us.). I may say “active” not in the sense that the reader is a standard novel character, but in the sense that since this is a book about writing and reading, therefore his implementation of the reader is a tool to help prove his points about reading/writing. His invitation to the reader in his work about the very process we are participating in makes us think actively and identify with the text. Calvino does his best not give us a particular identity, which is a very intelligent move on his behalf. Giving us a strict identity would alienate certain readers who opposed his reader ideal. Throughout, one questions their own expectations of the text.

In addition to providing a critique of the writing/reading process, Calvino offers some of the most beautiful prose I have ever seen in a translated text. A passage I found particularly striking was on page 156, Calvino writes,

Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, get lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against the moments, recovering time?

Calvino’s use of literary analogies is stunningly original. Not only does it serve the objective of the book (exploring ones own expectation of the text), but it is also paints an innovative representation.

-Melissa