The 306 Greatest Books #164 - If on a winter's night a traveler

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino. The book can be found on the Observer and My Book Lists.

If on a winter's night a traveler has to be one of the most unique books I have ever read, especially on this list. When thinking about how to categorize the book, I found it very difficult to place it within any category, however if push came to shove I would say that this is a mystery. The mystery for the story is that the main character, often just called the Reader, is trying to find the conclusion of story that he started reading but was missing from the book. During the process he discovers another Reader, whom he teams up with and they end up trying to hunt down the missing text together, only to come across a whole host of uncompleted books. The weird part about the story, is that at times the book is written as if it were talking to us, the audience. But at other times the author treats the book as a book, with the characters acting as one would normally act within a book. It's weird. Chapter one of the book started off so unexpectedly that I had to check a few times to make sure I wasn't reading an introduction:

"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...."

But after some flipping around the book I soon discovered that, yes, this is indeed how the book is going to go. I thought it was going to be a rather meta reading into the book, when it ends up shifting topics part of the way through, and eventually morphs into that mystery I mentioned. Although it does play with the meta part quite frequently, delving into what you are reading and treating the story as if that is what the Reader is discovering about the book he is hunting for. It feels almost as if this book were written for authors, and that authors would be the ones to get the greatest enjoyment out of it. But otherwise the text was extremely easy to read, at least in the translation I was using. I found I was able to read this book for longer periods of time and at a much faster pace than I am with many of the books on this list. The book was also fairly short, only about 250 pages. So, all in all, a definite recommend, especially for the unconventional nature of the story.