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.

Top 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.

• Beginnings and endings

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

• Authorship and authenticity

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

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