Fascinating book of beginnings & intrigue & what hooks a reader. ( )

The first chapter is a giddy delight, and there are some real high points, in terms of thinking about reading, what reading is for, why we read--but mostly it's a slow slide downhill. The fundamental problem is that Italo Calvino is very clever and pretty good at writing, but he doesn't actually know that women and people of color are people. He has an extremely clear idea of the Universal Person, who is always male and implicitly white, and this becomes more and more frustrating as the book goes on. Also the last few "novel excerpts" were unbearably horny, in a predictable and gross cishet dude fashion.
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Hard to describe this post-modern, part-Nabokovian narrative in which the reader is a central character, but it is fundamentally a book about books. I read the hardcover book, which I bought years ago and only recently found behind a bookshelf, while I listened to the Audible audiobook. The chapters seem to be in two parts: the first part of the chapter is a second-person narrative and in the second part is a fragmentary novel that the reader observes is different from the one he or she was reading in the chapter before. The style of the narrative brings to mind matryoshka dolls, a doll within a doll within a doll, or a story within a story within a story. Calvino makes some lovely observations about the nature and art of reading, with discussions about whether the second person being addressed is the same person who is reading the book. Yes, it is a strange, but also wonderful, story in which you, the reader, are a central character.

Near the end of the book, a character reads, in order, the titles of the fragmentary novels discussed; they form a sentence: "If on a winter's night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave -- What story down there awaits its end? -- he asks, anxious to hear the story." Calvino fancifully describes a local bookstore in which the books are classified in useful but somewhat impossible categories: books you have been planning to read, books you’ve been unsuccessfully hunting for years, books you can skip, books made for uses other than reading, books already read, books read even before being written. This description foreshadows the remainder of the novel. As the chapters progress, we read a series of opening chapters of books in various styles: magic realism, science fiction, mystery, contemporary Japanese, etc. Our journey through these novels mirrors the reader’s travel throughout the world and some imaginative scenarios. It gets even more complicated when a woman reader joins the narrative. We also read part of a book translated from an extinct language from a fictional country called Cimmeria, somewhere in northern Europe. The book ends with the woman and the reader in bed together, just as he's just about to finish If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino.

My favorite quote, because it seemed to address exactly what I was doing: "Listening to someone read aloud is very different from reading in silence. When you read, you can stop and skip sentences. You are the one who sets the pace. When someone else is reading, it is difficult to make your attention coincide with the tempo of his reading. The voice goes either too fast or too slow. And then, listening to someone who is translating from another language, involves a fluctuation, a hesitation over the words, a margin of indecision. Something vague, tentative. The text, when you are the reader, is something that is there, against which you are forced to clash. When someone translates it aloud to you, it is something that is and is not there, that you cannot manage to touch . . . "

Another favorite quote: "What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them, times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space." ( )

A real labyrinth of a novel. Calvino explores what it means to be a writer and delves into the heads of his readers at the same time. The conceit of this novel is beautifully executed with precision, humour, and amazing insight. ( )

Gets better as it goes on: so much of the book seems to be the set-up for the last 60 or so pages (which I really liked). As a whole, a valuable work of art; I'd like to discuss the ideas it presents.
And I think the structure has intriguing potential when used for ensemble-based physical theater. ( )