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Italo Calvino

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If on a Winter's Night a Traveller Paperback – 5 April 2002

by Italo Calvino (Author)

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Edition: 1^st

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'Breathtakingly inventive' David Mitchell

A masterwork by the incomparable, genre-defying, wondrous Italo Calvino.

You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You like it. But there is a printer's error in your copy. You take it back to the shop and get a replacement. But the replacement seems to be a totally different story. You try to track down the original book you were reading but end up with a different narrative again. This remarkable novel leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary and a quest. But the real hero of them all is you, the reader.

'Breathtakingly inventive' David Mitchell

'A writer of dizzying ambition and variety, each of his stories is a fresh adventure into the possibilities of fiction' Guardian

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ISBN-10

0099430894
ISBN-13

978-0099430896
Edition

1st
Publisher

VINTAGE ARROW - MASS MARKET
Publication date

5 April 2002
Language

English
Dimensions

12.9 x 1.7 x 19.8 cm
Print length

272 pages
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Review

Ingenious ― Mail on Sunday

Breathtakingly inventive

The greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century ― Guardian

Reading Calvino, you're constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before.This is highly unnerving: fortunately you're usually too busy laughing to go mad... I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends

A devastating, wonderfully ingenious parody of all those dreary best-sellers you buy at the airport... It is a "world novel": take it with you next time you plan to travel in an armchair ― Observer

Book Description

'A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say' - Italo Calvino

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ VINTAGE ARROW - MASS MARKET; 1st edition (5 April 2002)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0099430894
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0099430896
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.9 x 1.7 x 19.8 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 24,281 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 53 in Italian Literature (Books)
- 66 in Satire (Books)
- 1,158 in Humorous Fiction

Customer Reviews:
997

About the author

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Italo Calvino

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Italo Calvino (Italian: [ˈiːtalo kalˈviːno]; 15 October 1923 - 19 September 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).

Admired in Britain and the United States, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death, and a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by The original uploader was Varie11 at Italian Wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Entrancing

Reviewed in Australia on 10 March 2019

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Recalls the short fiction of Borges. Calvino hops effortlessly between genres as he explores the natures of literature and reading, and their relation to life. A novel consisting mainly of the beginnings of novels, and a postmodern classic.

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Kindle Customer

A postmodern book about books

Reviewed in Australia on 29 July 2023

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As long as you know that only one story will be resolved and can handle that, it's an enjoyable romp, a book about books.

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Diana

Postmodernism at its finest

Reviewed in Australia on 23 February 2019

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An amazing read that pushes boundaries and blurs the line between reader, subject and author. I love when form is experimented with and convention is obliterated and no one does it like Calvino.

Reviewed in Australia on 19 November 2016

2.5 stars
If On A Winter’s Night, A Traveller… is the 3rd stand-alone novel by Italian author, Italo Calvino. It is translated from Italian by William Weaver. The format is somewhat unusual: the chapters are addressed to the Reader (=you), written in the second person. These are interspersed with opening chapters from books the Reader is reading, or tries to read. Frustrated by printing errors, the Reader returns to the book shop to complain, where he is joined by the Other Reader (Ludmilla).

The fragments of the various books are vaguely interesting, but not as compelling as they apparently are to the Reader and the Other Reader, intent on finding the original titles and completing their reads. Some pieces are so dense, so tortuous (or is that torturing?) that the reader’s eyes (mine) glaze over. The stories feature espionage, leaving the farm, prison escape, revolutionaries (x2), murder, ringing telephone paranoia, mirrors as means of deceit, Japanese seduction, erasure and a duel.

The chapters featuring the Readers’ quest presents philosophy on the experience of books and reading from different perspectives: the reader, the translator, students of literature, publishers, authors, analysts of books and censors. The Reader is difficult to identify with, and must be starved for literature to be so enthralled by these fragments. It’s a mercifully short read that will at least give the reader an idea if they want more of Italo Calvino, or not.

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crazy planter101

perfect buy

Reviewed in India on 5 August 2021

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this is about the book and not its content. i thought this is a perfect buy. the book is brand new as i ordered, the paper quality is good and the print is readable.. cant wait to start my adventure . and after a long struggle with sellers, this one (cloudtail India) has kept its promosed and delivered..i therefore highly recommend it.

Filipa

Book

Reviewed in Germany on 25 September 2019

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As expected, well packed

Alex

Very unique book // Livre tres unique

Reviewed in France on 25 July 2016

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This book is a great read, and extremely original. It draws the reader into the story. The only issue I had with it was that the first half of the book is more interesting. The second half drags on a little, but that is only my opinion, and I still thoroughly enjoyed reading it!

Ce livre est une excellente lecture, et extrêmement originale. Il entraîne le lecteur dans l'histoire. La seule question que j'eus était que la première moitié du livre est plus intéressant. La seconde moitié traîne un peu, mais ceci est seulement mon opinion, et j'ai bien aimé ce livre!

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David Beeson

An excellent novel, leading you on from narration to narration to a surprising and witty ending

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 December 2014

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Novels about novels, or novelists, tend to be turgid – a tedious exercise in navel-gazing, they are usually self-indulgent and unappealing. That is emphatically not so for Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller.

That’s because in Calvino’s book, what he explores is the act of communication between writer and reader – in which the reader has as essential a role to play. Indeed, the novel is that most unusual thing, a second-person narrative: you the reader play the leading role in it (though sadly that’s you, the male reader – perhaps, in his defence, catering for a reader of either gender would have been too difficult).

You are trying to read a novel, specifically If on a winter’s night a traveller. But there’s been a terrible mistake in its printing: after you’ve read enough to gain a taste for it, you find it’s interrupted. And back at the bookshop, what you’re given as the continuation is, actually, quite another book. Which again is interrupted after the first chapter.

And so it goes on. You go from publisher to critic to translator and, ultimately to the writer, constantly seeking the next part of each of the books you start, each of them interrupted, always at a tantalising point. In the course of this quest, in which you’re joined by a fascinating female reader and her sister, the first gentle and self-effacing though just as assertive as the other, who is forceful and hot-blooded, you take us all through a voyage of discovery of what it is to write, and read, a novel: the feeling, for instance, that it might be preferable only ever to start a book, because as the novelist advances, all the options opened by the beginning are closed off. That impoverishes you the reader (see? you’re always in the frame.)

Each of the ten individual novels that we – that you – start to enjoy is compelling. All are mysteries of some kind: a subversive movement that has persuaded a narrator to an exchange of suitcases at a station, a femme fatale who may be seducing a narrator into assisting with her clandestine plans, a call to answer a ringing phone in a house that is not the narrator’s though the call is for him… All these tales promise interesting developments, though we the readers, or rather you the reader, soon learn to distrust such promises.

Are all these narrators the same narrator? Perhaps but perhaps not. If there is one consistent thread running through all the narrations, that’s you, the reader.

So the structure works. It’s a romp, often highly humorous, through the creative process, in which the writer is a character in his own novel, and the reader is as much so. At which point, the exploration isn’t simply the navel-gazing of the novelist describing novel-writing, but focuses on the relationship between the writer and the reader, creating a fictional space between them.

When I add that the ending is a jewel, wrapping up the whole story neatly and, above all, with great wit, launchng yu back on the track of the unfinished narration, what could possibly hold you back? An outstanding novel by one of Italy’s finest novelists. And the fact that it’s about novels works perfectly.

Not a word to say against it.

26 people found this helpful

mohamad

Super tale

Reviewed in Canada on 5 June 2013

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One of Calvino's great works. The suspense and flow of the story is gripping as Calvino allows us to join him ion his creation. A favorite of mine.

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THE CLASSICS

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Italo Calvino

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