If on a winter's night a traveler

[philena]

I read that book, among many others, over spring break, and I confess I'm somewhat ambivalent about it.  On the one hand it was very ingenious and well written, and I could see what had so impressed people about it. The problem, though, is that the framework narrative (told in the second person) gradually shifts from a description of what it is like to be reading a new book, much like the advice to the reader you find in the prefaces of old books, to a description of you, as a completely generic reader, reacting fairly predictably to specific events that are not unusual in the literary life of a book-reader.This is all nice--in fact, it's pleasant in a way to have such a relaxed, discursive, self-referential kind of narrative when you've heard so much about the book. When I realized that Oliver Twist, by the famous, immortal, genius, hyped-up-to-the-ears Charles Dickens (drumrolls, gasps, women faint and children scream at the mention of his name) had a plot and a narrative thread like any other novel, I was dreadfully disappointed, and finished it pleased that all was well, but distinctly unedified by my foray into the world of Great Literature. This book avoids that moment of realization much longer by remaining a description of the prototypical reader (sort of), and letting all the plot and narrative thread remain in the unfinished stories that it starts to narrrate. (There's even a discussion of the merits of a lack of specificity in one of the first chapters, although ironically that discussion is part of an unfinished story, not of the framework, where it would be more relevant.) But then the framework introduces other characters and some incredibly absurd plot developments, which are so absurd they can't possibly be serious, and indeed they become entirely unimportant, or at least neatly tied up, in themselves in the end. But the moments in the middle when they seem so strange destroyed any trust I had in the narrator (if you can still call it that), and the fact that a plot and narrative thread was avoided for so long, maintaining the mystique of the Great Book, make their unlooked-for appearance in the middle awfully jarring. I think I can see what's going on there, because Calvino sort of introduces himself, not as himself, but as the writer of the book, into the story when he writes the plot into Flannery's diary, so the framework rather becomes part of the ten separate stories, but it seemed an awfully extreme way of doing it. The bit with Lotaria-et-al in the prison library seemed too much like one of the sories itself: it bore no logical connection to the rest of the framework, really, and I just didn't get it. I did like the scene in the library at the end, even though my mother spoiled the part about puttiong together the titles for me. And I especially liked the story about the fellow who erases everything. That one was complete in itself, and satisfying.

If anyone else can enlighten me on what I'm missing, I would appreciate it. The book is ingenious, but I can't call it all the nice things people have said until I can understand why the narrative thread, whose appearance in a famous book is almost always too specific for all the hype the book has gotten, should get specific in such a bizarre way.

Comments

[newredshoes]

I haven't read that one yet, but of the three Calvinos I've read, Invisible Cities is by far the best. (The others were The Cloven Viscount and t-Zero. Er, I think. It's been a while.)