To read, or not to read? That is the question.

Where do I even begin? Well, I guess the beginning would be a good place to start. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino is unlike any other novel I have ever read in my entire life and I think that is why I like it so much.

So, while we're starting at the beginning of my thoughts about this novel, we might as well start at the beginning of the novel itself. In the first chapter, Calvino is giving the reader instructions on how to read this novel. He says, “Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; The TV is always on in the next room” (Calvino 3). I feel as though Calvino is giving the illusion that there is a way to read this novel. To somehow surpass the confusion and fog that he creates for the reader, when in reality there is not. In order to read this novel, one must suspend rational thought. They must let go of their past impressions or beliefs of what a novel should be or is supposed to be because that is not what this novel is. Calvino goes on to say on the first page of this novel, “Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find” (3). Just as there is no position that one can find to read this novel, there is no particular strategy that one can prepare to take on what is to come on the following pages.

Calvino writes, “…[H]e is known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself” (9). In a way, I think that is why Calvino does not give a perfect map on which a reader can follow in order to make it further into the “story.” He is not only defining himself as an author, but he is also challenging the reader to look at his writing from a different light. He wants to make the reader not only look at his writing differently, but also look at reality differently. We are so trained to think a certain way and act a certain way that we sometimes forget to question why we are doing those things in the first place. That is what this novel is doing for us; it is forcing us to question our believed reality. For example, Calvino goes so far as to pose the question of why we read in the first place. He does this through the character of Irnerio when he says, “Me? I don’t read books!...It’s not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us” (49). Just as it is impossible for the reader to change the writing in Calvino’s novel, it is also impossible for us not to read it. In essence, we are all playing a role in this manipulation, whether we want to or not, and must understand that, but not fight it because in the end, I believe the reader gains insight into the art of story telling and rhetoric that they may never have understood otherwise.