If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Blew me away. There's nothing more difficult than writing a compelling novel using second person narrative, while also weaving a series of interconnected novels or books-within-books, all under the umbrella of multiple meta-structures and general-purpose analytical or thematic lenses. And yet Calvino achieves this with grace and a sense of ease, the pages flow and have an airy sense to them, his prose is light but also rich and dense, with a mystical quality that hits you after the fact. One of the more amazing aspects to this book is how real each mini-book comes off as, to the point that I didn't catch on right away and was instead lulled into the fantasy that each next chapter would finally lead me to the "real" book I initially set out to read. Calvino knows the novel, the experience of writing and reading novels, as well as the novel's history. The book is replete with examples of Calvino showing the depth of his knowledge of what it means to write or read a novel, and how this interacts with cultural or literary traditions across a range of geographies and locales. He seems intent on showing readers that he knows every move, why its made, how to properly make it, and why these moves, taken together, matter. There's a beautiful core story, and the patchwork spaced in between and throughout that story is delivered with Calvino's poetic and delicate prose. An inimitable stylist and novelistic experimentalist. This is a must read. A singular work of literary fiction entirely deserving of its place among other great novels within the modern canon.

A great writer, but a very irritating book. Each of the stories is intriguing, resulting in a vast magnification of the problem I have with short stories. Regular short stories are too short and generally have cute endings or icky morals. In this case, there are no endings, which I suppose is on purpose, putting the reader into the novel as the readers desperate to find the endings. Calvino plays skillfully with narrative, and in fact the whole book seems to be an examination of various aspects of narrative. At first I didn't mind the second person voice -- I felt okay at being cast as the narrator's male alter ego or audience -- but when he then changed me to the female 'other reader' he's pursuing, it brought my own ego into it, and I began to resist. Then when he started describing my kitchen it was the last straw (he was wrong about everything, btw). So I didn't finish the book. But I did read the ending. It just wasn't the novel I wanted to read right now.