So what could make a reader like me happier than books? Books about books!
Such is the nature of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. This novel puts the reader in the front seat with a second person narration that opens up to a meditation on reading as a process and personal experience. A novel with one character would hardly have any plot to speak of, and, thus, you the Reader are accompanied on your journey through the corridors and anterooms of fiction with an Other Reader. You and the Other Reader become acquainted at a bookstore where both of you are trying to exchange defective copies of Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. You both had been looking forward to the novel for some time and were disappointed to find that only about thirty pages in cycles of the same pages begin to repeat themselves, a printing mistake that leaves you hanging just when the narrative has hooked you. You and the Other Reader exchange information, and you go home to delve back in to your new, non-defective copy of If on a winter’s night a traveler. But immediately you realize it is not the same book, but rather a novel called Outside the town of Malbork.
And so begins a strange odyssey through literature, the publishing industry, and visions of apocalypse hinged on truth and falsehood. You and the Other Reader set out on a quest to find a complete and non-defective copy of If on a winter’s night a traveler, but every time you think you’ve found it, you’ve only found a portion of an entirely different novel which also trails off without finding its end for one reason or another. Things become more complex because you grow engrossed with the novels masquerading as the original one you seek. You become so engrossed that you must track each of these broken novels back to their original source so you can find a satisfactory sense of closure.
With the Other Reader at your side, you discover a conspiracy of vast proportions with the translator Ermes Marana at its center. Marana started up the Organization of Apocryphal Power, the purpose of which was the dissemination of false books. Over time, the members became divided in their ideals and turned against Marana, forming the Archangels of Light and the Archon of Shadow. The Archangels of Light believe that supreme truth can spring from the crisis of falsehood, while the Archon of Shadow are obsessed with the idea of ultimate falsity in literature as being ultimate knowledge.
As you and the Other Reader cautiously undertake this epic quest, If on a winter’s night a traveler becomes a multiplicity of books in one: every novel you track down that is completely different from the manuscript you seek (there are 10 altogether), as well as the story of your quest and the conspiracy you become enmeshed in. Fiction layers fiction, and it is difficult to discern where the story ends and reality begins.
This novel is fantastic: a reader’s dream. What reader wouldn’t want to read a book about books? There are so many things here to marvel at. There’s the structure, which alternates chapters between the many novels and the Reader’s outer world of conspiracy, uncertainty, and personal reflection, all of which gives rise to a metafiction that rivals Pale Fire in its complexity and brilliance as a mode of storytelling. There are the novel fragments themselves, which transport you the Reader into worlds that are somehow at once both mundane and magical. There’s the conspiracy of false books, which is as beautiful and sinister an idea as I’ve ever heard. And then there are the Borgesian gems that pop up regularly: the Homeresque Father of Stories that tells tales without end, narrating away every minute of eternity (at times he’ll narrate an entire novel years before it has even been written or published); the computers that can effectively “read” books by tallying up the words that appear most frequently in the text and making logical connections as to the plot and style. And so on.
Prior to this novel the only thing I’ve read of Calvino’s is Invisible Cities. Invisible Cities was wonderful, and I think If on a winter’s night a traveler tops it.
