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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in If on a winter’s night a traveler, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Act of Reading
Academia and Publishing
Censorship and Government Oppression
Love, Lust, and Anxiety
Summary
Analysis
The narrator tells you that you’re about to start Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. The narrator suggests finding a comfortable reading position and getting rid of any potential distractions. He then asks you to set proper expectations for what you’re about to read. He imagines how you must have gone into a bookstore and passed all the books you don’t want to read in order to make it to the much-smaller section of books you do want to read and finding If on a winter’s night a traveler there.
Right away, the story breaks convention by starting narration in the second person, seeming addressing the reader directly (“you”). Additionally, it’s unusual that the book’s author, Italo Calvino, appears as a character in his own book. These opening lines ask the audience to reconsider what purpose the typical conventions of a novel serve and what happens if an author upends them.
Themes
The narrator imagines where you’ll read the book, perhaps at a desk job where you do something useless for the sake of the larger economy. Or he wonders if perhaps you have a practical job like surgeon or bull-dozer driver, in which case it would be too dangerous to read at work. Once it’s safe, however, you can begin reading the book and will find that it is fairly short and full of fragments, which the narrator says is fortunate because people today can only think in short fragments of time.
At this point, the book’s audience (“you”) still seems to be a character in the story. Once again, the novel questions the purpose of books, noting that reading may not be as important as performing surgery or driving a bulldozer. Still, this passage also begins to reveal how the narrator has a sense of humor and irony. When the narrator says that it’s good this book is fragmented to fit with people’s short attention spans, he is implicitly suggesting that the pace of modern life (the novel was written in the 1970s) has made people busier and given them less time to read—perhaps the narrator’s real problem isn’t with books but with the other things taking up people’s time.
Themes
The narrator wonders if you’ll recognize the style of the author, Italo Calvino, who has a reputation for changing his style a lot from one book to the next. The narrator encourages you not to let this discourage you, assuring you that the book is still very readable and that you might even enjoy some of its unusual qualities.
