I
read this book some years back, and, apart from it being a great
book, I thought I would mention it here, directly after Cloud
Atlas, because David Mitchell, the author of Cloud Atlas,
was fascinated by Calvino's book when he first read it as an
undergraduate. Even though, many years later, after a second reading,
he noted that he “didn't find it ‘breathtakingly inventive’ as
he had the first time...”, he goes on to stress that “however
breathtakingly inventive a book is, it is only breathtakingly
inventive once – with once being better than never.”
The
structure of If on a winter's night a traveller, with its
broken chapters and its separate stories, obviously had a very
positive ‘once being better than never’ impact on the future
author of Cloud Atlas. It
also had a a very positive impact on me.
In
essence, the book is about reading, and you
are the main character in the book. At
the beginning of the book, you discover that the pages in the book
you are reading are in the wrong order, and you return to the book
shop to get a new copy. There is another person having the same
problem as yourself, and, eventually, the two of you meet, and you
both set out to find a complete version of the book.
The
book is divided into
twenty-two sections or chapters, where every odd-numbered section (in
second-person) tells about your quest to read the book you have
started (a quest that always
seems to be thwarted in one way or another),
and every other section is
about those books - a
delightful mix of genres, topics and geographical locations. Forget
beginning, body and conclusion, because If on a winter's
night a traveller shows
that such structural limitations are not necessary in the telling of
a suspenseful
and interesting story (or stories).