Book Review: If On A Winter's Night A Traveler

Well-respected author, renowned for his "experimental" style and inventive short stories and novels, Wikipedia introduces Italo Calvino thus: "Lionised in Britain and America, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death, and a noted contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature."

So it's perhaps unfortunate that my first exposure to him came through possibly his most inaccessible work. A book about a reader trying to read a book, where the odd-numbered chapters are written in the second person and attempt to tell you what you, the reader, are doing and thinking, and the even-numbered chapters are chapters from the book "you" are trying to read. So, the first question that might come to mind is "Why?" closely followed by "What?"

If you're sufficiently interested you can do some research on the concept of metafiction. This book is widely reviewed as being "fresh, original, clever, inventive, masterful," etc, etc. But there are almost as many negative reviews where you'll find words such as "boring, too clever, tedious, impenetrable."

So, the ultimate Marmite book, then? Possibly. I guess it very much depends on whether you're looking for something different and potentially intriguing, and prepared to wade through chapter after chapter of nothing much happening to get it. And, if and when you finally do "get it", was it all worth it? I firmly believe there's a reason so few books are written in the second person. It doesn't work. Or at least, it doesn't work for a fair percentage of readers (me included), and why would an author contemplate using such a device when it's guaranteed to limit his or her audience? Personally, I don't like being told that "I" am doing this or that, or thinking this or that, when clearly I am not. Suspension of disbelief doesn't even come into it, as there is no belief created in the first place.

Apparently those sequential first chapters, while initially appearing to be random and unconnected, are in fact connected in some nebulous way and contribute somehow to the eventual resolution (inasmuch as this novel can be said to have a resolution - when it comprehensively fails to end in another explosion of "cleverness") but you'd have to really want to hunt for these clues and quite frankly I was so bored with the whole thing I gave up halfway through, as have a number of reviewers before me. A handful of bookclub readers said they had given up in the past but found it easier to read at the second attempt. Maybe knowing in advance how the book "works" gives you some protection from the tedium.

But for me, I'm happy to agree with an Amazon reviewer who asked why, when there are so many other books out there to read and so little time in which to read them, would you bother wasting any of that precious time on this?

I have always had a problem with books that are too clever for their own good - Cloud Atlas being the most often mentioned example. But this takes cleverness (and hence problem) to a whole other level. It is overtly cynical and manipulative of the reader. Yes, fiction in general does this. Obviously. Stories are intended to move you, transport you to other worlds, other lives, other experiences. Have we learned anything new by having that fact rammed down our throats by Calvino? Is it really "playful" as some reviewers put it? Or is it exploitative? I don't care. I just don't want to know.