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Rating: "It is a novel about the pleasure of reading novels, with the protagonist being the reader, who ten times starts reading a book that, due to circumstances beyond their control, they do not manage to finish. I thus had to write the beginnings of ten novels by imaginary authors, all somewhat different from me and different from each other."
This is how Italo Calvino spoke about "If on a winter's night a traveler", his novel first published in 1979. It is a unique book, a unique masterpiece. Because if your name is Italo Calvino, you can afford to write a work in which the protagonist is the reader themselves, you can afford to write the events that happen to them, you can afford to write about a reader, who significantly does not have a proper name, to whom all sorts of things happen: they simply want to read your new book "If on a winter's night a traveler," but instead you make them start reading ten different novels without getting beyond the first chapter. You are Italo Calvino, you can do that.
The Reader, which is to say us, finds love in these misadventures with the lovely Ludmilla, the Reader, a great lover of books, and her passion is pure, total. With her, you (meaning I, meaning the Reader) share your adventures. And what do you end up with? With nothing. You have the love of Ludmilla, yes, but you can't even finish one of those ten damned novels.
As I said, if your name is Italo Calvino, you can write such an outlandish story, you can make it literary avant-garde, you can write a metanovel where everything is false and uncertain. And you can do this without being heavy or lofty. The author plays with this superimposition of levels, this confusion between the book you physically hold in your hands and the ten that the Reader, who is you but whom you purposely consider different from yourself so as not to further complicate the situation, begins to read. Of these, the first is titled "If on a winter's night a traveler," just like Calvino's real book, the one you are reading. Intricate, right? Genius.
This original literary device is not, however, an end in itself: the author describes to us the total confusion of life, where true and false exchange and intertwine, where man can no longer find their Ariadne's thread. It is a novel about the pleasure of reading novels, true, but it is also a novel about the complexity of modern life: everything is false, and its creation of the false is highly organized, managed by a secret association dedicated precisely to counterfeit works. And the head of this association, Ermes Marana, is the very embodiment of falsehood. The representation of its acceptance as inevitable. Everything is false, therefore we must accept it as true. Not only is the fundamental structure of the work genius, but also its being an allegory of the condition of modern man. The "traveler" in the title is the Reader, and generally man, who travels, travels, travels in a world they know to be fake. It is the brutal representation of the society in which we live.
All of this is "If on a winter's night a traveler," an incredible book, as incredible as the world: everything is perfect, from the meanings to the title (by the way, try to join the titles of the ten novels the Reader begins to read, and you'll get the opening of another book!), from the external structure to the reader/protagonist identification. Intricate? Genius.
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