If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino's version (and anti-version) of the nouveau roman, fits the conditions for "proper art" proposed by Dedalus/Joyce: "The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing." It is a wonderful piece of work, labyrinthine and convoluted, informed by a deadpan humor and pastiches, imitations, and parodies of an entire battery of modern and postmodern literary techniques.
It begins with an almost conventional storyteller's address to the reader: "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax…." We immediately see that "Italo Calvino" is somebody other than the author, and as we read, discover that "you" is not the usual foil, the time-honored figure to whom the narrator tells, in the first- or third-person, his story. "You" is the second-person protagonist of the novel, and he is, above all other things, a Reader. What he does, or wants to do, in chapters that detail his adventures, is read. The chapters dealing with "you" alternate with the chapters that he is reading, but through error, carelessness, chance, design, conspiracy, these chapters (10 of them) are not from the same book; they are the first chapters of 10 different books, and each breaks off at the point of crisis or suspense: they are cliff-hangers.
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Read the rest of this Criticism with our Calvino, Italo 1923–: Critical Essay by Gilbert Sorrentino Access Pass.
