If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Italo Calvino
Language: English
Pages: 260
ISBN: 0156439611
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
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to represent anybody: four ex-convicts of whom one is an escapee, three former patients with their male nurse and the male nurse's manuscript. Or else there are pairs, not necessarily but tendentially husband and wife, as if the shared life of a couple had no greater consolation than the production of manuscripts. Each of these characters has asked to speak with the person in charge of a certain department or the expert in a certain area, but they all end up being shown in to Mr. Cavedagna.
is the sign of real wealth, solid and vast, in the sense that if, we'll assume, I had only one story to tell, I would make a huge fuss over this story and would end up botching it in my rage to show it in its * * * true light, but, actually having in reserve a virtually unlimited supply of narratable material, I am in a position to handle it with detachment and without haste, even allowing a certain irritation to be perceptible and granting myself the luxury of expatiating on secondary
keep me in this state, knowing I cannot answer but know that I should answer. Or else the anxiety when I have just left the house and I hear a telephone ringing that could be in my house or in another apartment and I rush back, I arrive breathless, having run up the stairs, and the telephone falls silent and I will never know if the call was for me. Or else also when I am out in the streets, and I hear telephones ring in strange houses; even when I am in strange cities, in cities where my
take for granted a dissatisfaction that can be redeemed only in the sum of all dissatisfactions? Reader, prick up your ears. This suspicion is being insinuated into your mind, to feed your anxiety as a jealous man who still doesn't recognize himself as such. Ludmilla, herself reader of several books at once, to avoid being caught by the disappointment that any story might cause her, tends to carry forward, at the same time, other stories also.... (Don't believe that the book is losing sight of
counterfeiters and anyone who cooperates in the dissemination of the faked books!" I said, looking meaningfully into the translator's eyes, because I suspected this young man was not without a role in the shady business. He said his name is Ermes Marana, a * * * name I had never heard. His head is oblong horizontally, like a dirigible, and seems to hide many things behind the convexity of its brow. I asked him where he lives. 'For the moment, in Japan," he answered me. He declares himself
