If On A Winter's Night A Traveler (1982) - Plot & Excerpts
Previously Unpublished Manuscript #1Who am I? Who is I? Who is the I?Unlike my friends and colleagues, Professors Calvino and Galligani, I intend to tell you my name and perhaps to reveal something of my modus operandi (soon, too).This one sentence might already have supplied enough information or implication to let you work out or infer who I am?Have you guessed yet? No? Well, my name is Professor Uzzi-Tuzii, though my friends call me Julian. Not only is that my name, but that is who I am. Yes. It's true. I am Professor Uzzi-Tuzii.See how much I have revealed about myself, see how much I have revealed about who I am, about who “I” is!I is me. I am me. I could not be anyone else, could I? I am not and never was Italo Calvino. I am not the Reader, although it's also true I am a reader. Nor then could I be you (as if that is not self-evident to any strict grammarian), so put an end to that speculation. It will not help you to realise anything. It will only frustrate you, which in a way was an objective of the novel "If on a winter's night a traveller".I wish you could see the real me, sitting comfortably here on my swivel chair, on my polished timber floor, looking at my computer screen, surrounded by the music of time.You might learn a little more about me, just by being able to see me.To know the real me, to see the real me, might make me a sight for sore eyes. I am no eyesore (though I appeal less with age). However, I am the remedy you need for your eyesight, I promise, if you will let me, that I will heal your vision, so that you might see.There are none so blind as those who will not see. So I will try to make you see. If you will.What am I going on about? Perhaps, you do not believe me? Perhaps, now, as I promised, I need to explain my modus operandi?Will the detail of my modus operandi overcome your skepticism? Will you only believe me, believe that I am I and I am me, if you know what I do? Do you honestly believe that I cannot be what I am unless I reveal what I do? Or what I did?Oh, what unbelievers we have become.Are you ready?Believe me, I would tell you, I will tell you everything, if you would only believe me.I only say this, I only make this diversion, because some do not believe me. Some believe I am unreliable. Some believe, without seeing me or knowing me, that I am an unreliable narrator.How unfair! How hurtful! Do I deny you? No, of course, I don’t. How could I deny you? I don’t even know you. You must remain innocent, unless and until proven guilty. So I must believe in you, if I am to find you guilty.In order to tell you what I did, there is one other thing I must tell you about who I am, or more precisely who I am not.I am not William Weaver, I am not the translator of "If on a winter's night a traveller", the book you might be reading or would be reading if you were not reading my addendum.That probably goes without saying, though I think it needs to be said.I am not Ermes Marana, the translator of the fictitious book "If on a winter's night a traveller", the book within the novel "If on a winter's night a traveller".Would it help if I explained, there is no such translator?You might already think that he was a fiction, that he wasn’t real, that he was a figment of Italo Calvino’s imagination.I have no doubt that, when my friend Italo learned of his apparent existence, he passed him off as a figment of his imagination. But he is, in reality (if that makes sense), a figment of my imagination, well, a figment of the imagination of those around me.At this stage of my story, the book must be making less sense now than when I started? I apologise, yet I have to argue in my defence that this often happens during the telling of a story.You, the reader, perhaps the Reader, have to let me get on with my story. I have to tell it at my pace, which at my age lacks apparent haste, but you have to cooperate. You have to do your bit. So, can we resume?Perhaps, before we do so, now might be a good time to refill your glass of red or to make a cup of tea...[Editor’s Note: The manuscript breaks off here. It is not known whether this is a piece of fiction.]Previously Unpublished Manuscript #2So how do I start to tell you my story?Italo Calvino never had any such doubt. You should have seen him laugh when I told him about the line from Doctor Who, “First things first, but not necessarily in that order.” He enjoyed starting a story at the beginning so much, he couldn’t help doing it over and over.So I will start at the beginning, in his footsteps.When my story, indeed your story, began, I was in my thirties and at the height of my career as an academic, author and public intellectual as they used to say in those days.Before I met your mother, I thought I could have any woman I wanted, and I almost did.To my great regret, I persisted in this belief after I married Maria, though it was my great good fortune that I never acted on any of my impulses.This story partly concerns just how close I did come.Being an author of fiction, I looked on writing as an act of love, an act of seduction. I caressed meaning out of words as I would caress a woman.I stopped when I met your mother, well, I mean, for a while she became the exclusive focus of my thoughts and caresses. Then, six months after our wedding, at the end of the academic year, I agreed to teach a Creative Writing Course for Masters of Fine Arts students during the three month break.For the first time in many years, there were no male students, there were only ten female students, all of them young, intelligent, attractive, and available, or so I thought at the time.They absorbed information and guidance quickly. Each of them gazed into my eyes, as if they wanted to know the full contents of the dark pool that lay behind.At night, while I caressed your mother skillfully, if not lovingly enough, I could only think of these other temptations.They progressed so well in their studies that we soon came to their practical exercise. Each of them was to write the first chapter of a novel that they would finish after the course.I selfishly came up with the idea of the subject matter, and every one of them agreed compliantly. They would write in the first person, and that first person would be me. They would appear in the chapter under their first name. And each chapter would feature an object that would have significance in the story.Madame Marne: suitcaseBrigd: trunkZwida: pencil boxIrina: instrument caseBernadette: plastic bagMarjorie: phoneLorna: mirrorMakiko: white maple caneAmaranta: fireplaceFranziska: sheet of paperI was hoping that this artifice would disclose some secret feelings towards me, within the limits of what they could say, knowing that their writings would be scrutinized by their (jealous) classmates.Instead of me seducing them with my words, I wanted them to seduce me with theirs. I could hardly contain my excitement. Your mother started to suspect something was happening and cooled to my touch.Then one day, the deadline arrived and all of the students handed in their work.I had insisted that the project be surrounded by secrecy, so much so that I even banned carbon copies (this was before personal computers and laptops). I didn’t even think to photocopy each manuscript at the office. I took them straight home that night and began to read them, one after the other.I know now that, soon after I went to bed, Maria woke and entered my study to read whatever it was that had so fascinated me late into the night.She only had to read a few pages to know what I was up to. She packed her bags and every single one of those manuscripts and disappeared.When I awoke with the sun, I thought your mother had gone to work early and someone else had stolen the manuscripts.I couldn’t think of a motive, unless one of my colleagues had guessed my plan and was determined to frustrate it. Probably that damned Italo Calvino.It was only late in the day, when Maria phoned me to say that she was staying at Italo’s for a few weeks, that I guessed what must have happened.I quickly forgot all of my carnal designs. I was more concerned about what Calvino was doing to my wife, your mother. My colleague, my friend was sleeping with my wife. What better way to best your rival than to sleep with his wife?For all my education though, it was an agitated guess. Jealousy made me err. Italo had no intention of sleeping with your mother.I found out afterwards that he counseled Maria to return to me as soon as possible, especially only days later, when she learned that she was pregnant...to me, of course, with you.It must hurt you to know that, at the time, your mother’s first thought was to have an abortion. Why perpetuate this bond with the fiend that I had become?Italo managed to convince her what a mistake this would have been, and you know what joy you brought to your mother’s life.Still, Italo did do something that I held against him for a long time. He read the manuscripts from beginning to end, even before I had finished them.When, much later, I found out, I felt cheated, as if I had bought a first edition, only to have a friend whisk it away and read it before I had opened it.Sometimes, only you should be the one to smell the scent of those first-opened pages. Not only did Calvino deprive me of this pleasure, he decided to put these manuscripts to much better use than I had intended.He had been planning a novel, the progress of which had stalled at outline stage. These manuscripts provided exactly what he needed.He needed the first chapters of ten stories, told in different voices. What could be better than ten stories told by ten separate students?All he needed to do was insert metafictional interstices. He was planning to write just the interstitials.Of course, he contacted each of my students privately and obtained their signed consent, on the basis that, when they finished their work, he would help promote their literary careers.He did what he had bargained to do. Of the ten, six now have successful writing careers, which I attribute more to Italo’s assistance than my guidance.Despite my pleas, Maria stayed with Calvino for more than four months, by which time it had become quite apparent to everyone that she was pregnant.Her return coincided with the launch of Calvino’s book. Maria returned home to me, resplendent in pregnancy, the morning of his launch party.We attended as an ostensibly happy couple, although I did appear quite sheepish and it took me many years before I actually read his book.My failure to do so is also the reason it took me so long to put all of the pieces of this puzzle together.My students had promised Calvino confidentiality, if only to keep his involvement secret from me.Most importantly, Calvino had wanted your mother and I to repair our relationship, free of any external publicity or pressure.I don’t know what would have happened if I had read his book straight away. I probably would have thought of him as a consummate manipulator.You see, his book wasn’t just a quintessential exercise in metafiction. He was trying to teach me a lesson. He was trying to teach me to love your mother more, not to love her obsessively, but to love her as she deserved.He saw love as the driving force of life itself. Love is the light that keeps darkness at bay. Stars shine and create light, but there is much interstitial darkness. It is the role of love to fill the gaps.When your mother died many years later, I learned that Italo had given her a signed first edition copy of the book for each of you and her.It was their plan to give the two of you your copy when you turned 30, when you had already learned something of life yourselves.When she died, I committed to perform this task on her behalf.You know how upset I was when your mother died. I always felt that I had never loved her enough. You cannot overcompensate in love. An excessive act of love cannot make up for an omission to love. All you can do is love as someone deserves to be loved.I felt so guilty about that time before you were born, that I planned never to write fiction again, at least until the two of you had reached the age of eighteen. I had realised that fiction is too selfish to be compatible with parenthood, after all you two were your parents’ greatest act of creation. By the time you reached eighteen, I had got out of the habit. Only now, in my old age, is the desire to write fiction returning to me.The inscription in your first editions varies in only one word, your first name. Indeed, Italo had two special editions of the book printed with your names reversed in the body of the text where they both appear.In one edition, it reads “Ludmilla”, in the other it reads “Lotaria”.So my beautiful twins, our beautiful twins, I present to you the gift of Italo Calvino and your parents.Italo inscribed your first edition with these words: “The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death. Your life is a story that must be told and only you can do the telling.” Your father learned this lesson the hard way, but I am eternally grateful to your mother and my good friend, Italo Calvino, that you will have the opportunity to tell your stories.Literary Executor’s Note:The above manuscripts were found with Professor Julian Uzzi-Tuzii’s last Will and Testament and two signed first editions of Italo Calvino’s book, "If on a winter's night a traveller".Professor Uzzi-Tuzii died on 8 May, 2012. He was survived by his twin daughters, Ludmilla and Lotaria Uzzi-Tuzii, who turned 30 five days later on Mother’s Day, 13 May, 2012. The Executor of Professor Uzzi-Tuzii’s Estate made the gift to Ludmilla and Lotaria on behalf of both parents.
If on a Winter's Night a TravellerItalo CalvinoJust one word: AWESOME !! "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveller. Relax. Let the world around you fade." The opening line of this unusual book really fades the world around you and immerses you in a mystical, eccentric, surreal world where you are energised right from the scratch to encounter the world which refers to its own existence- something which is unprecedented. The book is a genius in a way that how it approaches the story- narrative of the book is in second person -the protagonist is a young male reader known simply as The Reader. There is a second character, a female reader, referred to by the author as the Other Reader. The relationship between the two characters is one of the two plot drivers of the book. Calvino borrows plot and style from authors of each of different genres, inserting them in his novel, making it inter-textual, or based off of many texts. The author has a lot to stay with the ongoing story. The protagonist of the book is apparently 'you'- the reader- who then moves through the inter-textuality of the novel to come across different manuscripts- each of which is interrupted just after 'You' begins to relish it; and 'You' continues to search for a thread through which 'You' can connect these manuscripts, however soon 'You' realizes that it's a futile attempt to look for such a thread , and that too not before 'You' finds another character facing the same dilemma- both of you spans bookshops, probable authors (of those manuscripts) to look for such a thread . Eventually, 'You' accepts that it's the structure of book- those manuscripts are written not to be connected- and when 'You' starts enjoying it-its structure, puzzles, prose style- just then it ends and 'You' gets the same feeling which 'You' gets after finishing a surreal movie. It happens that 'You' start a chapter and feel it was not very good and then Calvino would do something brilliant and ‘You’ would feel wow by what he did- as earlier what seemed to be boorish and distracted chapter turns into a great experience- and it continues throughout the book.The novel- which can be best described as: book within a book about many books - can be said as epitome of postmodern literature- a perfect example of meta-fiction; Calvino proposes that novels could be more quickly read by having a computer break them down into lists of word frequencies; he sets down sample lists to evoke whole novels. He shows 'You' the developments in modern literature- the books which have become prominent examples of contemporary literature: in the process he depicts human nature about possessions while spanning 'You' through a bookshop to finally arrive at If on a winter's night a traveller "But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend acres and acres the Books You needn't read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. ..........; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Reread and The Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read And Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them............you have turned toward a stack of If on a winter's night a traveller fresh off the press, you grasped a copy, and you have carried it to the cashier so that your right to own it can be established." "Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life,if they are defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books." Calvino explores human sexuality through the relationship between two characters- through interaction between them, their interests. The two central characters share a love of reading for reading's sake, in contrast to some of the other characters in the book. It is this shared love which drives the romance, but the book recognizes that reading is ultimately an activity you do alone: One reads alone, even in another's presence. But Calvino also draws the parallel between love-making and reading. The narrative of the book here gradually moves to 'The Other Reader' from 'You' "Ludmilla, now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert to your gasps and your trills. It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being. " In the last chapter Calvino shares his thought- his different point of views- about reading through different readers, the first reader says: “Don’t be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue ot the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.” Calvino best describes the experience of reading through the sixth reader: "The moment that counts most for me is the one that precedes reading. At times a title is enough to kindle in me the desire for a book that perhaps does not exist. At times it is the incipit of the book, the first sentences. . . . In other words: if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.” At this juncture, I am facing the dilemma which is unique to works of Calvino- it isn't easy to review them and this one also seems to be another futile attempt.However, there's one thing which can be said with assurance that If on a winter's night a traveller is a book about the pleasure of reading.
What do You think about If On A Winter's Night A Traveler (1982)?
I'm not the kind of person to define myself. Of course, I know I'm a daughter, sister, wife, etc and most importantly, a mother. But besides my relationship to other people, if I'm 'forced' to think about what defines me, what I know I've always been, as far back as I can remember, is a Reader. And if you are the same, then, like me, you will feel that Calvino is speaking to you -- you are his You.I can't say there weren't very brief times when my attention wandered during one of the stories that is part of the labyrinth that You get lost in. But these were moments only, and then I could feel myself smiling at the meaning, and the skill of Calvino -- his prose is, surprisingly, (as far as my pre-perceptions at what this book might've been like) extremely 'readable' -- just as I was smiling even more at the very last sentence of this amazing book. And this is from someone who feels she is more a Reader of traditional novels than so-called 'experimental' post-modern texts such as this one. Calvino has put into words what I feel, and isn't that what the best novels do? If you are a Reader, I think You will love this book.
—Teresa
A delightful romp of two readers on a quest to find fulfillment in books. It felt like a wonderful hybrid of Borges’ compressed imagination, David Mitchell’s broken stories in “The Cloud Atlas”, and Jasper Fforde’s placement of reader sleuths into his farces. The book got its hooks into me right from the beginning, talking directly to me as the reader entering a bookstore to acquire this new novel by Calvino. So engaging to have me negotiate through a bunch of idiosyncratic book categories. For me this one would fit the category of “Books You Have Been Meaning to Read for Ages” and “Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Has Read Them, Too”. How could I go wrong with 22 of 25 Goodreads reader friends rendering 4 or 5 stars over the experience? This novel is less a single coherent story than a series of vivid demonstrations of the varied ways we relate to books as a reader. Into this dance are woven the perspectives of the writer, the publisher, the plagiarist, the translator, the culture bound by the common language, and the political regime which judges literature by its own agenda. The reader becomes a character experiencing different stories from different places and styles with linking interludes concerned with his quest for satisfaction of a completed read.I don’t want to spoil the fun of the stories in the book, so I’ll keep to some examples of the themes. An overall concept Calvino plays with is the linear structure of beginnings and endings that all literature must deal with. Instead of God beginning the process of creation by separating light and darkness, the writer begins with a place and time (the iconic “It was a dark and stormy night …” of the Snoopy cartoon and here “If on a winter night a traveler …”): But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. The romantic fascination produced in the pure state by the first sentences of the first chapter of many novels is soon lost in the continuation of the story: it is the promise of a time of reading that extends before us and can comprise all possible developments.The continuation of this thought is a fair summary of Calvino’s efforts in this book:I would like to write a book that is only an incipit, that maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning. , the expectation still not focused on an object. But how could such a book be constructed? Would it break off after the first paragraph? Would the preliminaries be prolonged indefinitely? Would it set the beginning of one tale inside another, as in the Arabian Nights?The interdependence of the writer and reader is another major theme, which is brought alive by making literature some kind of performance art. Many writers in the modern age since the challenge of quantum physics came on the scene have made literary analogies with the contribution of the observer to consensus reality, but Calvino makes such play a lot of fun. The role of the reader in the story begins as a simple identification with the “I” of a first-person narration. In slipping into third-person narrative, we come to feel we are looking over the shoulder or through the eyes of the writer or his narrator, whether Calvino on the upper layers or those of the stories-within-the-story. But things begin to get more complicated the moment the writer engages the reader directly with a second-person “you”, which can get expanded with a plural version, or bind the reader even more by slipping into a “we” mode. All this academic stuff is made flesh in the story as you the reader of the first tale meet another reader seeking the completion of a book interrupted by a publisher’s defect.This “Other Reader”, Ludmilla, is a woman quite alluring to the first Reader (and to me). To her a book is some kind of doorway to an unwritten reality waiting to come into existence. Some examples:“…I wish the things I read weren’t all present, so solid you can touch them; I would like to feel a presence around them, something else, you don’t know quite what, the sign of some unknown thing. …” “Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be …””The book I would like to read now is a novel in which you sense the story arriving like still-vague thunder, the historical story along with the individual’s story, a novel that gives the sense of living through an upheaval that still has no name, has not yet taken shape …”.As the Reader begins to seek a personal relationship with Ludmilla, his efforts are interfered with by her sister Lotaria. For her books are not sacrosanct, but merely a tool to be used for their ideas. She uses computer programs to deconstruct novels into themes identifiable by word frequencies. She is writing a thesis on a certain author’s work to “to demonstrate her theories.” While Ludmilla finds any knowledge about the author as a person irrelevant (her ideal author is one who produces books “as a pumpkin vine produces pumpkins”), Lotaria, seeks dialog with the author for participation in interpretation. In a wonderful scene where she corners a blocked Irish writer, he is taken aback that she seeks in his work only what she already believes in. She asks: “Would you want me to read in your books only what you’re convinced of?”“That isn’t it. I expect readers to read in my books something I didn’t know, but I can expect it only from those who expect to read something they didn’t know.”“What you want would be a passive way of reading, escapist and regressive …That’s how my sister reads. …”The author finds no uplift from either sister’s views in the face of the blank pages that haunt him. Ludmilla as the ideal reader is tarnished by banishing him as a person (“How well I would write if I were not here!”). The magic of the writer’s leap is marvelously captured in a scenario in which he watches a neighbor woman on an outdoor deck as she reads:At times I am gripped by an absurd desire: that the sentence I am about to write be the one the woman is reading at that same moment.Instead of being a fruitful impetus, the fantasy becomes instead an albatross and a curse:At times I convince myself that the woman is reading my true book, the one I should have written long ago, but will never succeed in writing…It’s no use my sitting down again at the desk, straining to guess, to copy that true book of mine she is reading: whatever I may write will be false, a fake, compared to my true book, which no one except her will ever read.…Readers are my vampires. I feel a throng of readers looking over my shoulder and seizing the words as they are set down on paper.The analogies of reading and sex are a wonderful topic of play for Calvino. The meanings of sex between author and reader is a source of farce. Sex between the Reader and other characters brings out the whimsy of writer as a superego God. The multisensory wonders of sex in collapsing time and space is a worthy model for a book to aspire to, but the subject here becomes an excuse for a flight of abstraction as arcane as Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Stairway” (e.g. “is it the most submissive abandonment, the exploration of the immensity of strokable and reciprocal stroking spaces, the dissolving of one’s being in a lake whose surface is infinitely tactile?”).In sum, I had a lot of fun with all the gymnastics and somersaults Calvino serves up. Many readers will find this book too didactic, just an illustration of ideas. But because Calvino embraces paradox and complementarity of ideas, there is plenty of lively play free of dogmatism. This is the same feeling I got from his posthumously published book, a set of undelivered lectures titled “Six Memos for a New Millennium”. In it he explores literary values he considered important for the future of writing: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity (the sixth was supposed to be Consistency). I delighted to see how he assessed diverse literature by these themes and would look forward to someone elucidating the specified themes as embodied in this novel itself.An impish Calvino from the pen of David Levine for the New York Review of Books
—Michael
لو أن مسافرا في ليلة شتاء بهذا الكتاب وحده، دخل كالفينو قائمة كتابي المفضلين، نادي مجانين السرد الذين يقلبون كيانك بكتاباتهم، أظهر كالفينو كل قدراته وكل سخريته في هذه الرواية، ها هو يصنع عملاً مبهراً، عن فن القراءة وعن فن الكتابة معاً، نوع من ألف ليلة وليلة معاصرة، حيث يقفز القارئ من قصة إلى قصة من دون أن يدرك نهاية لأي منها، وكل قصة لا تفضي إلى قصة كما هو الحال في ألف ليلة وليلة، وإنما كل قصة تبتر بسبب غباء وتلاعب دور النشر والمؤلفين، هكذا... نمضي ونحن نطارد فصولاً مفككة ومدمجة معاً في لعبة قص لا تنتهي. منذ زمن لم اقرأ كتاباً بهذا الجنون، بهذا الكم من المتعة، بهذه القدرة على القبض على شهوتنا الجامحة للقصة، ونشوتنا المفقودة عندما تبتر القصة ولا نحصل على شعور الإشباع ذاك. يذكر كالفينو في رسالة كتبها لأحد النقاد أن مجموعة من أشهر الروائيين أثروا بشكل أو بآخر بأسلوب كتابة فصول هذه الرواية، وهو ما يصعب علينا كقراء اكتشاف أين كان ذلك التأثر، هذه الأسماء الأيقونية تضم بولغاكوف وتانيزاكي وكاوباتا وخوان رولفو وأرجيداس وبورخيس وتشسترتون. إنها رواية عملاقة عن القارئ، وعن الكاتب، عن الناشر وعن دور النشر، عن الكتابة كفن والقراءة كمتعة خالصة. سيفتتح كالفينو الرواية بك أنت، أيها القارئ، سيتحدث عنك، كيف تجلس مرتاحاً لقراءة كتابه (لو أن مسافراً في ليلة شتاء)، هذه القراءة التي ستبدأ برجل غامض في محطة قطار، سرعان ما ستحبط عندما تكتشف أن الكتاب الذي بين يديك وقع ضحية خطأ مطبعي جعل بقية الكتاب تكرار للفصل الأول، هكذا ستذهب للمكتبة لتستبدل الكتاب هناك ستلتقي بفتاة جميلة تدعى لودميلا جاءت تشكو من ذات الشيء، وكلاكما سيقرر أن يحصل على كتاب آخر لمؤلف آخر بعدما تكتشفان أن الكتاب الذي قرأتماه وأعجبكما ليس لكالفينو وليس (لو أن مسافراً في ليلة شتاء)، وإنما هو (خارج بلدة مالبورك) لكاتب بولندي يدعى بازاكبال، هكذا كل كتاب يفضي بطريقة ما لكتاب آخر، إنها رحلة ممتعة مع قاص مذهل، تتركنا في النهاية بحسرة على كل هذه القصص الجميلة التي لن نعرف نهاياتها أبداً.
—Fahad
