If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Summary

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a novel by Italo Calvino, published in Italian by Einaudi in 1979 and in William Weaver's English translation in 1981. It is a novel about reading novels, addressed to 'you', the Reader, who becomes its main character. The book opens as you sit down to read Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. The story, about a traveler at a railway station, breaks off when the pages begin to repeat because of a binding error. Returning to the bookshop, you learn that the volume was bound with pages from a different novel, and you meet another reader, Ludmilla, who is searching for the same continuation. Each attempt to find the rest of the book produces the opening of yet another novel, by a different author, in a different style, and each breaks off at a moment of suspense. The search for the missing books draws you into a widening plot involving a university professor of an obscure language, a publisher's harried editor, Ludmilla's sister Lotaria, who analyzes books by computer word counts, an Irish novelist with writer's block named Silas Flannery, whose diary forms one chapter, and Ermes Marana, a translator who forges and counterfeits books and who is linked to a secret society of book pirates. Your travels take you to imaginary countries, including Ircania, where a police official explains the state's relationship to forbidden books. The novel alternates twelve numbered chapters in the second person with ten novel openings, ranging in manner from a spy story and a Japanese erotic tale to a Latin American adventure and a political thriller. The titles of the ten openings, read in sequence, form a sentence of their own. In the final chapter, in a library, readers discuss how stories end, and the novel closes with you and Ludmilla married, in bed, as you say that you are just finishing If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino. Calvino wrote the book while associated with Oulipo, a group of writers who used formal constraints, and it reflects on authorship, translation, interpretation and the pleasure of beginnings. It is widely regarded as a landmark of postmodern fiction.

Plot or Argument

• Chapters 1–3: The defective copy

  You begin the novel, discover a binding error and meet Ludmilla while seeking the rest of the book.

• Chapters 4–7: The academics and the publisher

  Professors, an editor and Lotaria complicate the search; you visit Ludmilla's apartment.

• Chapter 8: Silas Flannery's diary

  The blocked novelist reflects on reading, writing and his rival Marana.

• Chapters 9–12: Ircania and the library

  You travel abroad, encounter state censorship and conspiracies, and finally read in a library before the closing scene with Ludmilla.

• The ten novel openings

  Interleaved incipits, from 'If on a winter's night a traveler' to 'What story down there awaits its end?', each interrupted at a moment of suspense.

Characters

• The Reader (you), protagonist

  Addressed in the second person; seeks the continuation of an interrupted novel.

• Ludmilla, major

  The Other Reader, who reads for pleasure and whom the Reader comes to love.

• Lotaria, minor

  Ludmilla's sister, who analyzes books ideologically and by computer.

• Ermes Marana, major

  Translator and forger who sows confusion among books and authors.

• Silas Flannery, major

  Famous Irish novelist suffering from writer's block.

• Cavedagna, minor

  Weary editor at a publishing house.

Lessons

• The reader as character

  By making 'you' the protagonist, Calvino draws attention to what readers do. Students can reflect on their own habits of reading.

  • How does it feel to be addressed as 'you'?
  • What kinds of readers does the novel describe, and which are you?

• Beginnings and endings

  The book offers ten openings and no conventional middle. It asks why beginnings attract us and what an ending provides.

  • What do the ten openings have in common?
  • Is the final chapter a satisfying ending?

• Authorship and authenticity

  Forgeries, translations and ghostwriters fill the novel. Readers can discuss how much an author's identity matters.

  • What does Marana want to achieve?
  • Does it matter who wrote a book you enjoy?

Context

In the 1960s and 1970s European writers and critics explored the relationship between author, text and reader, while the French group Oulipo, which Calvino joined, wrote under formal constraints. Italy's publishing industry and its political tensions in the 1970s also shape the book's satire.

Composition

Calvino wrote the novel in the late 1970s, while living in Paris, and Einaudi published it in 1979. William Weaver's translation was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1981. Calvino later described its structure in an essay for an Oulipo publication.

Reception

The novel was widely discussed in Italy and abroad and became one of Calvino's best-known works. Critics frequently cite it as an example of postmodern metafiction, and it is often taught in courses on the novel and on literary theory.

Comparisons

• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

  Sterne's novel is the great earlier experiment in digression and in a narrator who plays with the reader.

• Don Quixote

  Cervantes's novel, with its found manuscripts, interpolated tales and a hero shaped by reading, anticipates Calvino's games with books.

• The Arabian Nights Entertainments

  Scheherazade's interrupted, nested stories provide a model for Calvino's series of broken-off openings.

• Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays

  Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, another Italian work, also exposes the machinery of fiction.

• Swann's Way

  Proust's novel reflects at length on reading and memory, themes Calvino treats with comedy.

• Nineteen Eighty-Four

  Orwell's surveillance state, which controls what may be read, finds an echo in Calvino's police officials of Ircania.

• Why Read the Classics?

  Calvino's essay of two years later sets out in fourteen definitions the ideas about reading and rereading that the novel dramatizes.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The second-person address and how it changes.
• How each novel opening breaks off.
• The titles of the ten openings.
• Silas Flannery's diary and its reflections on writing.

Key terms and names

Metafiction

Fiction that draws attention to its own status as fiction.

Second-person narration

Narration that addresses the reader as 'you'.

Incipit

The opening words or beginning of a text.

Oulipo

A French group of writers who use formal constraints to generate literature.

Frame narrative

A story that contains other stories.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Why can't the Reader finish the first novel?
2. Comprehension Who is Ermes Marana, and what does he do?
3. Interpretation Why does Calvino address the reader as 'you'?
4. Interpretation What does Ludmilla represent as a reader?
5. Big Question Why do we read fiction?
6. Big Question Does a story need an ending?

Faith Connections

• Ecclesiastes 12:12 (Scripture)

  'Of making many books there is no end': the Preacher's remark fits a novel crowded with books, forgeries and endless beginnings.

• Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (Great Conversation)

  Sterne's playful narrator offers an eighteenth-century model for a novel about its own making.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: By turning the act of reading into a plot, the novel suggests that meaning arises between book and reader, and that the desire for stories is renewed by every beginning.

Rhetorical device: apostrophe. The narrator speaks directly to 'you', instructing the reader how to settle in and begin, so that the reader becomes the protagonist.

Debate: Resolved: The novel's lack of conventional endings makes it more satisfying, not less.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Analyze how Calvino uses the second person to make the reader part of the novel.

Comparison with The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: Compare how Sterne and Calvino play with the conventions of the novel.

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write the opening page of an eleventh novel for the book, in a style different from the other ten, and break it off at a moment of suspense.

• Essay

  Discuss what the novel suggests about the relationship between readers and authors.

• Classroom

  Read the titles of the ten embedded novels aloud in order, then discuss how they form a sentence and what it means.

Further Reading

• Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

• Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino

• Italian Folktales, Italo Calvino

• Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne