I may be biased because we are back to the novel and I love neglecting my computer, but If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler made my week. Most of the books I would call “favorite” are by authors that poke fun at the reader or in some way play with the reader’s expectations or tease out new ones, so I quite enjoyed Calvino’s narrative tricks and innovations—naming characters You and I; writing a book about the thwarted reading of a book; attempting to conquer a work that is merely one beginning after another with dwindling hope of closure; giving the story of reading a story a more prominent position than the story itself.

The format of narrative chapters followed by chapters narrating followed by narrative chapters gives sort of a beach-reading perspective—I feel a definite undertow effect. I don’t mean that my feet keep getting wet, although my apartment does flood when it rains, but that we, the Readers, are given (what I think maybe are) noisy first-chapters of various novels, which are then lured back by the lunar pull of Calvino’s novel, which are then replaced by other intriguing first chapters, which are then pulled back away from the page, replaced by others, pulled away again. Between waves of seemingly endless first chapters is an almost manipulative…calm…of what may seem a bit more familiar to novel readers: a linear, continuous plot with (most of the time) a consistent point of view and reoccurring characters. This forces some reading strategy clearly other to passive, as we need to constantly reinterpret certain meanings that we have come to accept as truth (what is a novel? Is this a novel?) as we progress through the stacks of narrative (much like the first numbered chapter’s journey through the book store) that Calvino offers.

I generally find a bit of self-awareness in a novel charming, however charming is not exactly the right term for this, but it is the first that comes to mind. Its charms are louder than, say, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (which is adorably self-aware), which works almost as Memoir Writing 101. Calvino’s book, instead of making readers aware of what writing entails, makes readers aware of just how we read: what our physical patterns are; what our mental patterns are; what we have been taught, through schooling, to expect; what we have been taught, through experience, to expect. While the self-awareness of the book may read as pretentious in many ways, it seems almost (for lack of a better image) sort of a dominatrix of self-aware literature—seductively confident, with the literary wiles to whip any reader to their knees. With every “I” in the book aware of himself as a narrator, it is pretty difficult to forget (for long at least) that you, the Other Reader, and we are actually reading. This is not Harry Potter, where one can watch the action play out in the mind unbroken, but rather a broken narrative that is always pulling readers back to the awareness of reading. Arrogant book. Maybe I am giving it too much credit, and the ego I perceive is only that which I have given it by my endless compliments (if you could, say, boost the ego of a literary work).

Calvino calls attention to the materiality of this and all print texts by having you and the Other Reader (Ludmilla, the class, whatever) encounter so many reading difficulties. They, and we, are painfully aware that it is a book that is being read. By not having us encounter such problems as uncut pages or spliced novels, we (okay, maybe just I) become entirely aware that this book, for all of its problematics, is actually a linear, fully cut, properly bound novel.

While reading If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, we are not you, the Reader, but are rather more like Professor Uzzi-Tuzii. As we read, “a story is taking shape, from [our] toilsome deciphering of verbal lumps a flowing narrative emerges.” (53)

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