![]() If on a Winter's Night is dazzling, vertiginous, and deeply romantic. ![]() Meanwhile the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other. The real Calvino intersperses 10 different pastiches-stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition-with explorations of how and why we choose to read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. But this copy turns out to be by yet another writer, as does the next, and the next. Given the choice between the two, he goes for the Pole, as does the Other Reader, Ludmilla. Returning to the bookshop, he discovers the volume, which he thought was by Calvino, is actually by the Polish writer Bazakbal. Let the world around you fade." Alas, after 30 or so pages, he discovers that his copy is corrupted, and consists of nothing but the first section, over and over. The Reader buys a fashionable new book, which opens with an exhortation: "Relax. ![]() In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narration-"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded." Italo Calvino's novel is in one sense a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader, ultimately end up married, having almost finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. ![]()
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