If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler in Never too Late to Read Classics

Mar 15, 2009 Laura rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary-fiction, 1001-books-you-must-read-before-you, read-2009, books-on-books, italian-literature, bookcrossing

A masterpiece of the post-modernism fiction.

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Jul 09, 2009 Jeffrey rated it it was amazing

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You open your copy of If on a winter’s night a traveler for the first time in years – perhaps even decades – has it really been since college when it was assigned that you read this book? Or have you, sometime between grad school and those lost years before you found a career or in those years when you sporadically read or re-read great books when you found false careers, did you read it again? Certainly, if you’ve been telling people it was your favorite book for so long you must have picked it You open your copy of If on a winter’s night a traveler for the first time in years – perhaps even decades – has it really been since college when it was assigned that you read this book? Or have you, sometime between grad school and those lost years before you found a career or in those years when you sporadically read or re-read great books when you found false careers, did you read it again? Certainly, if you’ve been telling people it was your favorite book for so long you must have picked it up at least once since it was assigned all those years ago. Indeed, you have a specific memory of opening the book late during that stint you were waiting tables before your life came into better focus, before those years teaching and long before you did what you do now. You were high or drunk and you never read books that way, but those first paragraphs and pages felt so perfect and beautiful that you were brought nearly to tears. That is a distinct memory.

Reading it again now, sober and older and employed, you aren’t brought to tears, but you are nonetheless transported, in a way, to the person you were when you read it for the first time in place you were back then with the same sense of possibility and potential you had in that youth. It’s not Calvino doing it, of course, but the overwhelming power of nostalgia. Calvino just happens to be the talisman that opens the door for you – for someone else it could be a production of A Doll’s House or a song by The Smiths. But some of the differences between this present you and that idyllic you of the past are fabrications anyway – you are less jaded now rather than more so and sober can mean so many different things. Older though, for sure.

Competing with the past is a fear that your more world-weary adulthood will produce an altogether different impression of the book. You thought the second person narration was brilliant and maybe it was nostalgia layered on top of nostalgia because you remember remembering being transported back to an even further youth and Choose Your Own Adventures books from your childhood. But more concretely, you remember the paper you wrote for that Humanities Colloquium (after reading this one) and then that story just a few years ago when you thought about family and manhood and replacing roofs. You can’t help but still love the gimmick, so that’s one thing that doesn’t cheapen with time.

The next fear is that the whole thing could feel trite and contrived. What you remember as a glorious tribute to the act of reading – and a little to the act of writing too – could feel artificial and forced. But no, you come to that passage in the beginning about the books you haven’t yet read and the books that were read before ever having been written and the ramparts and armies of other books that stand between you and the book you’re meant to read and you still grin. You come to the beginning of the third section of the book and you’re still hooked on a sense of adventure as you - yes YOU, you beautiful second person protagonist - begin your quest in earnest.

You are reassured as you read. You are still the person you thought you were in Dr. Peterman’s class so long ago – or at least you’re enough like him to still love this book. Is it your favorite? That’s harder to answer – you’d really have to re-read some others from some other parts of your life, but it’s certainly up there. You’re happy to have grown and to have matured, but there’s a certain immortality in finding impermeable surfaces within yourself – tastes that have withstood the tides of time. ...more

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Jul 29, 2015 Douglas Beagley rated it it was ok

This was my third attempt to read this book, and I have wandered off again. This is appropriate. It is a wandering kind of book.

Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, and many other Calvino works wed a kind of poetry to thought, so that a story of ideas becomes a story of images. The mind climbs up and down the ideas, but does not grow dry or stale because they are embedded with poetry.

This is not always fertile soil for character or story, however. Ideas! Images! Grand. And if you can get a character w ...more

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