Mariner Books If On A Winter's Night A Traveler 如果在冬夜，一個旅人

“Calvino is a wizard...There is no halting [this book's] metamorphoses.” — New York Times

 

In 2009, The Telegraph ranked it 69th in a list of ‘100 novels everyone should read’ describing it as a “playful postmodernist puzzle.” Italo Calvino has been described as “the greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century” by The Telegraph.  

 

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a feat of striking ingenuity and intelligence, exploring how our reading choices can shape and transform our lives. Originally published in 1979, Italo Calvino's singular novel crafted a postmodern narrative like never seen before—offering not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense.

 

The book begins with a chapter on the art and nature of reading, and is subsequently divided into twenty-two passages. The odd-numbered passages and the final passage are narrated in the second person. These chapters concern the reader's adventures in reading Italo Calvino's novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Alternating between second-person narrative chapters of this story are the remaining (even) passages. Eventually the reader meets a woman named Ludmilla, who is also addressed in her own chapter, separately, and also in the second person.

 

The second-person narrative passages develop into a fairly cohesive novel that puts its two protagonists on the track of an international book-fraud conspiracy, a mischievous translator, a reclusive novelist haunted by advertisers who wish to embed products in his stories and programmers who demand to let a computer generate the conclusion to his unfinished novels, a collapsing publishing house, and several repressive governments.

 

Together, the stories form a labyrinth of literature known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers pursue the story lines that intrigue them and try to read each other. It’s almost hypnotic how this whole book is structured – each story introduces you to a new world and new characters, but you never find out how any of these stories end. It was so frustrating but very clever. Deeply profound and surprisingly romantic, this classic is a beautiful meditation on the transformative power of reading and the ways we make meaning in our lives.

 

Features

• Edition : -
• Binding : Hardcover
• ISBN : 9780156439619
• Publication Date : 1982/10/20

 

Materials & Care

• Imported