Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler constantly draws attention to the act of reading a book, referencing itself within the story and even including Italo Calvino as a minor character. Fittingly enough, the main character in the novel is “the Reader,” whom the narrator also addresses as “you.” While the novel seems at first to be breaking the fourth wall and addressing the real-world audience directly, the narration eventually reveals that the “you” in the story is actually a specific character—a single man who gets obsessed with reading stories from beginning to end and whose actions are often driven by attractive women he meets (like Ludmilla, the Other Reader). This is just one of many ways that Calvino draws attention to the typical conventions of novels, showing how authors may act like they’re writing for an audience of everyone, when in fact their books presume a very specific audience (often of heterosexual males, like the “you” in the story).
Indeed, more the novel goes on, the more it seems to surprise the audience and perhaps frustrate expectations, refusing to provide closure on any of its 10 stories-with-a-story and leaving open other mysteries as well. In the titular first story, If on a winter’s night a traveler, the narrator points out that the train station he’s at is only a carefully structured illusion—and that nothing exists outside the train station or even inside it unless the book specifically mentions it. While some novels, perhaps of the kind that the fictional pulp crime writer Silas Flannery might write, seem to offer a conventionally ordered reading experience with a beginning, middle, and end, Calvino pulls back the curtain to show the audience the inner workings of a novel and how many readers accept the conventions of a novel without considering them. Calvino doesn’t do this to belittle the practice of reading but instead to show the potential of all the things a reader can see as well as why it can be limiting to just blindly accept the conventions of a novel. Although Calvino encourages viewing the novel through new eyes, he also references older works like the Arabian Nights, showing how his “new” ideas about the fragmentary nature of reading have old roots in history. In If on a winter’s night a traveler, Calvino crafts a fragmented story that deliberately forces the audience to see the limits of the novel as a medium. At the same time, he uses these fragments to celebrate the diversity of what a novel can be, particularly once people look past the usual conventions of the form.
The Act of Reading ThemeTracker
The Act of Reading Quotes in If on a winter’s night a traveler
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.
The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph.
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?
“Me? I don’t read books!” Irnerio says.
“What do you read, then?”
“Nothing. I’ve become so accustomed to not reading that I don’t even read what appears before my eyes. It’s not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear.”
I sensed at once that in the perfect order of the universe a breach had opened, an irreparable rent.
The Cimbro-Cimmerian debate does not seem to affect Ludmilla, now occupied with a single thought: the possibility that the interrupted novel might continue.
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.
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.
Maybe this is why I need mirrors to think: I cannot concentrate except in the presence of reflected images, as if my soul needed a model to imitate every time it wanted to employ its speculative capacity.
The Koran is the holy book about whose compositional process we know most. There were at least two mediations between the whole and the book: Mohammed listened to the word of Allah and dictated, in his turn, to his scribes. Once—the biographers of the Prophet tell us— while dictating to the scribe Abdullah, Mohammed left a sentence half finished. The scribe, instinctively, suggested the conclusion. Absently, the Prophet accepted as the divine word what Abdullah had said. This scandalized the scribe, who abandoned the Prophet and lost his faith.
He was wrong… The scribe’s collaboration was necessary to Allah, once he had decided to express himself in a written text.
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.
On the ground that separates me from Franziska I see some fissures open, some furrows, crevasses; at each moment one of my feet is about to be caught in a pitfall: these interstices widen, soon a chasm will yawn between me and Franziska, an abyss!
“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.”