If On A Winter's Night A Traveller

"The concept is amazing. When you first encounter it, you can’t believe someone pulled it off. Its skeleton, if I can call it that, comprises ten chapters—or chapter beginnings—from different novels. And in between these false starts you meet a reader, presented as ‘you’, who like the real you is reading each new chapter only for it to break off midstream. These interstitial chapters narrate the reader’s attempt to track down the rest of the novel only to discover, instead, the beginning chapter of a new novel. This keeps going on and gradually these fragments and the search for their missing counterparts becomes a novel unto itself. That’s the basic setup. I mean, I find it quite enjoyable, although it does test your patience. I think we all sometimes get to a point in a book where we think, ‘I’m a little tired of this,’ or ‘I’m ready for something new.’ Calvino teases again and again the pleasure of opening a new book. He casts you as the ‘traveller’ of the title, repeatedly showing up in virgin territory, new terrain, and there’s real excitement in that. This is a metaphor for the reader, who is always a tourist in the territory of their reading, never an immigrant. But then you often do want to know what happens. You want resolution. So the book puts an interesting strain on you. It frustrates the inherent expectation of prosecuting the plot that has been set up for you. The plot becomes a meta plot, grounded in interstitial drama of trying to piece together into a coherent whole what is by nature fragmentary and incomplete. You could see this as a metaphor for novel writing. By breaking apart its elements, the book draws attention to the puzzle-like nature of fiction . But it also, by fracturing the reading experience, puts pressure on the idea that a novel draws its meaning from the continuity of its plot. In true postmodern fashion, it refocuses on the timeless or conceptual aspects of what a novel is, as opposed to just, you know, a set of entailed events, one following the next. It puts forward a vision of one-novel-as-all-novels, showing how content can keep shifting while pattern and form endure."