If on a winter's night a traveler

Italo Calvino is amazing. This was my second read of If on a winter's night a traveler, and I caught more wit (arrogance?) and wordplay than before. I'm not sure how to even go about describing the plot except to say that it's a book about books. It is metafiction at its most obnoxious (arrogant?), and it's done flawlessly. Really, anyone vaguely interested in literature should read this book at least once. Not only is it a good example of good literature, but it comments on the very concept of literature. On the pressing of the novel I own, there is a quote from The New York Review of Books that says: "Calvino is a wizard," and I couldn't agree more.


"Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find."

"Try to foresee everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else?"

"It's not that you expect anything particular from this particular book. You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst."
"Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears."

"I leave traces if I do not speak with anyone, since I stick out as a man who won't open his mouth; I leave traces if I speak with someone because everyone word spoken is a word that remains and can crop up again later, with quotation marks or without."

"I am not the sort of person who attracts attention. I am an anonymous background presence against an even more anonymous background."

"This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition."

"...these are people used to seeing one another daily year after year; everything they say is the continuation of things already said."

"You spend a restless night, your sleep is intermittent, jammed flow, like the reading of the novel, with dreams that seem to you the repetition of one dream always the same."

"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."

"They want problems to debate, general ideas to connect with other general ideas."

"This is a dead department of a dead literature in a dead language."

"I go past the meteorological observatory, and I think of the end of the world which is approaching, or, rather, which has been in progress for a long while."

"There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive."

"I am telling the first impressions I noted, which are the ones that count."

"...I find in the day's light, in this diffused, pale, almost shadowless luminosity, a darkness deeper than the night's."

"In any case, the person who finds this diary will have one certain advantage over me: with a written language it is always possible to reconstruct a dictionary and grammar, isolate sentences, transcribe them or paraphrase them in another language, whereas I am trying to read in the succession of things presented to me every day the world's intentions toward me, and I grope my way, knowing there there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of the obscure allusions that lurks in these things."

"The doctors have given me permission to consume alcoholic beverages in moderation."

"I took this dialogue as a warning to be on guard: the world is falling apart and tries to lure me into its disintegration."

"I sensed at once that in the perfect order of the universe a breach had opened, an irreparable rent."

"'All books continue in the beyond.'"

"The truth is that we were all very young, too young for everything we were experiencing..."

"In a distress that lasts an instant, I seem to be feeling what she feels: that every void continues in the void, every gap, even a short one, opens onto another gap, every chasm empties into the infinite abyss."

"'I didn't mean to discuss; I wanted to read.'"

"Because in this way all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life was too dense and ramified and embroiled for me to bear it always with me, imagine so many lives, each with its own past and the pasts of the other lives that continue to become entangled one with the others."

"Anyway, the conclusion to which all stories come is that the life a person has led is one and one alone, uniform and compact as a shrunken blanket where you can't distinguish the fibers of the weave."

"Everything happened in the quickest and cleanest way, giving him no time to turn and recognize me, to know who had arrived to spoil his party, maybe not even to become aware of crossing the broder between the hell of the living and the hell of the dead."

"It was better like that, for me to look him in the face only as a dead man."

"I'm producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some other occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first, and so, setting out from any momoent or place, you encounter always the same density of material to be told."

"I sit down at the desk, but no story I invent corresponds to what I would like to convey."

"There is a telephone chasing me, there is somebody looking up all the numbers on Chestnut Lane in the directory, and he is calling one house after the other to see if he can overtake me."

"We live in a uniform civilization, within well-defined cultural models: furnishings, decorative elements, blankets, record player have been chosen among a certain number of given possibilities. What can they reveal to you about what she is really like?"

"Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books."

"It could be an important feature to be added to your portrait: your mind has interior walls that allow you to partition different times in which to stop or flow, to concentrate alternately on parallel channels. Is this enough to say you would like to live several lives simultaneously? Or that you actually do live them? That you separate your life with others, elsewhere? That in every experience you take for granted a dissatisfaction that can be redeemed only in the sum of all dissatisfactions?"

"Would you like to penetrate her shell, insinuating yourself among the pages of the books she is reading?"

"The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest--for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both--must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story."

"In short, what you are doing is very beautiful but grammatically it doesn't change a thing. At the moment when you most appear to be a united voi, a second person plural, you are two tu's, more separate and circumscribed than before."

"It is not 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."

"...she is not reading you, single and whole as you are, but using you, using fragments of you detached from the context to construct for herself a ghostly partner, known to her alone, in the penumbra of her semiconsciousness, and what she is deciphering is this apocryphal visitor, not you."

"Lover's reading of each other's bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost."

"What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."

"Is she a prisoner with me? Is she my prisoner? Is she my prison?"

"Now it seems to me that everything that surrounds me is a part of me, that I have managed to become the whole, finally."

"There is thought in the universe--this is the constant from which we must set out every time."

"...I do not believe totality can be contained in language."

"Perhaps my true vocation was that of author of apocrypha, in the several meanings of the term: because writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impact, then flung far away; because there is no certitude outside falsification."

"Where should banned books be found if not in prison?"

"How long are you going to let yourself be dragged passively by the plot?"

"The body is violent action! The body claims power! The body's at war!"

"You're the absolute protagonist of this book, very well; but do you believe that gives you the right to have carnal relations with all the female characters?"

"As for him, he wanted, on the contrary, to show her that behind the written page is the void: the world exists only as artifice, pretense, misunderstanding, falsehood."

"The world is reduced to a sheet of paper on which nothing can be written except absract words, as if all concreate nouns were finished..."

"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."

"I read and reread, each time seeking the confirmation of a new discovery among the folds of the sentences."

"Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment."

"For years, I have been coming to this library, and I explore it volume by volume, shelf by shelf, but I could demonstrate to you that I have done nothing but continue the reading of a single book."

"For a while now, everything has been going wrong for me: it seems to me that in the world there now exist only stories that remain suspended or get lost along the way."