‘If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveler’ by Italo Calvino (1979) – 253 pages        Translated from the Italian by William Weaver

The best description of ‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler’ is provided by Italo Calvino himself within the novel itself:

“I have had the idea of writing a novel composed only of beginnings of novels. The protagonist could be a Reader who is continually interrupted. The Reader buys the new novel A by the author Z. But it is a defective copy, he can’t go beyond the beginning….He returns to the bookshop to have the volume exchanged….

I could write it all in the second person: you, Reader….I could also introduce a young lady, the Other Reader, and a counterfeiter-translator, and an old writer who keeps a diary like this diary….”

So here we have the first chapters of ten separate novels, each with its own separate characters and situations. This is the challenge that Italo Calvino has set for himself, switching the narrative ten times while somehow maintaining the readers’ interest

This is the kind of ridiculous challenge the members of the avant-garde literary group OULIPO, which included Georges Perec and Italo Calvino among others, would set for themselves.

Each chapter starts out with a section where You the Reader is the main character who is just trying to find a good novel to read but keeps getting interrupted after the first chapter for some technical or ridiculous reason and must start again still another novel on the first chapter. Along the way You the Reader meet the female Other Reader Ludmilla to whom you are strongly attracted.

Then each chapter winds up with the first chapter of one of the ten different novels that You the Reader begins.

It took me a long while to warm up to ‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler’. Why would I want to read the first chapters of ten different novels, each with its own separate characters and plots? I longed for the simple playfulness of Calvino’s early work like his Our Ancestors trilogy (‘The Cloven Viscount’, ‘The Baron in the Trees’, and ‘The Nonexistent Knight’) or of the stories in his whimsical ‘Cosmicomics’ series. My first impression was that “If on a Winter’s Night…” was way too cluttered and convoluted for its own good.

The plot, as well as the humor, of “If on a Winter’s Night…” is more convoluted, more difficult to follow, than in his earlier novels.

It is complicated tying all these first chapters of ten novels together, and Calvino makes it as far-fetched as possible. That is part of the fun, but this work lacks the simple playfulness of many of his earlier novels.

In each of the ten first chapters of novels, the reader must cut through a thicket of obscure references to get to Calvino being his usual playful self. It is hard work to read this novel, harder than it ought to be.

By all means read Italo Calvino because he is one of the best, but start with something else other than “If on a Winter’s Night…”.

‘If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveler’ is not for beginners to Italo Calvino. People new to Calvino should start with the ones I mentioned above and fall in love with his playful writing right away as they are most likely to do.

Grade:    B

‘Cosmicomics’ by Italo Calvino (1965) – 151 pages                      Translated from the Italian by William Weaver

It still stuns me that even while I’m standing in one place or sitting or even lying down, I’m traveling through space at thousands of miles an hour.

In ‘Cosmicomics’, Italo Calvino’s playful conceit is that there were people, a family, around to witness the creation of the Universe, the Sun, the moon, the stars, and the planets. Humans with their naive cute notions were there at the time the dinosaurs walked the Earth and the time when dinosaurs became extinct. Humans saw it all, or at least the young guy called Qfwfq and his family saw it all. ‘Cosmicomics’ is a laugh riot, but much more than that.

There’s Grandma, Grandpa, and Mother and Father, as well as the boy and his sister as well as some of their neighbors, and especially there is always a lady or girl friends to help Qfwfq on his way.

Having read some of Italo Calvino’s earlier works such as the ‘The Nonexistent Knight’ and ‘The Baron in the Trees’, I was well familiar and delighted with his playful approach to his fiction. I was a bit afraid that his later work would lose that childlike attitude, but happily in ‘Cosmicomics’ he kept that light-hearted spirit. ‘Cosmicomics’ is great fun to read.

Every story in ‘Cosmicomics’ starts out with a, shall we say, spurious scientific notion. The first story, “The Distance of the Moon”, begins with:

“At one time, according to George H. Darwin, the Moon was very close to the Earth.”

At this point, you may think these stories are very scientific, too scientific to be any fun, and you would be wrong.

So then we proceed to a story about a group in a boat raising a ladder and grabbing a hold of the moon. Actually the story winds up being very romantic, when our hero gets stuck on the moon with his lady love as the moon moves away from Earth. Read it for yourself.

In the second story, ‘At Daybreak’, Father and Mother and Granny are all there as the Earth begins to solidify via the condensation of a shapeless nebula. For the family, the transformation starts out as a troublesome itching for which they all have to scratch themselves.

Italo Calvino was a member of the Parisian literary group Oulipo along with Georges Perec and others. Calvino’s specialty was the short story while Perec wrote long novels, but they are both playful and like to play games with their readers.

Sometimes Calvino’s playful exuberant constructs seem almost magical; other times as he continues with them to the merciful end it feels like he is kicking a dead horse or at least beating a lame construct. Fiction is all about taking chances.

In the third story, ‘ A Sign in Space’, first we are given the information that it takes the Sun 200 million years to make a complete revolution of the Milky Way galaxy. So our hero in the story puts up a sign at a point in space so he can tell when the Sun has made a full revolution.

Italo Calvino puts the fun back in fiction for me.

Grade:    A