Books Symbol Analysis

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.

You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. No. You don’t recognize it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself.

And so the Other Reader makes her happy entrance into your field of vision, Reader, or, rather, into the field of your attention; or, rather, you have entered a magnetic field from whose attraction you cannot escape. Don’t waste time, then, you have a good excuse to strike up a conversation, a common ground, just think a moment, you can show off your vast and various reading, go ahead, what are you waiting for?

The Cimbro-Cimmerian debate does not seem to affect Ludmilla, now occupied with a single thought: the possibility that the interrupted novel might continue.

You realize at once that Mr. Cavedagna is that person indispensable to every firm’s staff, on whose shoulders his colleagues tend instinctively to unload all the most complex and tricky jobs.

Ermes Marana appears to you as a serpent who injects his malice into the paradise of reading.

This quote describes the Reader’s reaction to first hearing about Ermes Marana, a translator whom the Reader learns about in the publishing house he visits and who seems to have an unusual life full of conspiracy and mystery. Marana has a reputation as a counterfeiter, claiming to translate books but in fact replacing them with translations of totally unrelated books. While the Reader seems to be interested in Marana, unable to stop reading his letters, ultimately the Reader finds Marana disturbing.

By raising the idea that a translation could be an unfaithful copy of the original, Marana destroys the Reader’s notion of a book as an act of communication between an author and a reader. Although Marana represents an extreme case, he illustrates how in general, translation can be a tricky job, and even a faithful translator may nevertheless introduce some changes into a book. By refusing to remain ignorant about the book-making process, the Reader, like Ludmilla, finds himself falling down a rabbit hole of questions that make him doubt everything he knows about reading. This reinforces the novel’s broader argument about how the truth can be elusive and fragmented.

It was a mistake to invite her: this was during my first days of teaching, they did not yet know the sort I am here, she could misunderstand my intentions, that misunderstanding in fact took place, an unpleasant misunderstanding, even now very hard to clarify because she has that ironic way of looking at me, and I am unable to address a word to her without stammering, the other girls also look at me with an ironic smile.

This book so far has been careful to leave open to the Reader who is reading the possibility of identifying himself with the Reader who is read: this is why he was not given a name, which would automatically have made him the equivalent of a Third Person, of a character (whereas to you, as Third Person, a name had to be given, Ludmilla), and so he has been kept a pronoun, in the abstract condition of pronouns, suitable for any attribute and any action. Let us see, Other Reader, if the book can succeed in drawing a true portrait of you, beginning with the frame and enclosing you from every side, establishing the outlines of your form.

I have had the idea of writing a novel composed only of beginnings of novels. The protagonist could be a Reader who is continually interrupted. The Reader buys the new novel A by the author Z. But it is a defective copy, he can’t go beyond the beginning.

“I don’t know if you believe in the Spirit, sir. I believe in it. I believe in the dialogue that the Spirit conducts uninterruptedly with itself. And I feel that this dialogue is fulfilled as my gaze examines these forbidden pages. The Police is also Spirit, the State that I serve, the Censorship, like the texts on which our authority is exercised. The breath of the Spirit does not require a great audience to reveal itself; it flourishes in the shadow, in the obscure relationship perpetuated between the secrecy of the conspirators and the secrecy of the Police.”

“If on a winter’s night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave— What story down there awaits its end?—he asks, anxious to hear the story.”

The seventh reader interrupts you: “Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”

You stop for a moment to reflect on these words. Then, in a flash, you decide you want to marry Ludmilla.

And you say, “Just a moment, I’ve almost finished If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino.”