"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." With these words, which open his latest novel, Calvino confronts the relationship of the world of fiction to the world of actuality. The rest of his book shows how the fictive imagination interacts with reality and how each is dependent on the other. Calvino takes Descartes a step further: "The univers...

Like a play within a play, Calvino's [Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore] is both double and dual. Eleven chapters and ten incipits, the beginnings of as many unrelated, interrupted "novels," form one whole. The frame story is about nothing less than "ce vice impuni, la lecture," the pleasure of vicarious experience or of escape offered by the printed page and the many circumstances that contribute to it or stand in its way. In the early chapters we get an almost...

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 storytelle...

[Things get complicated in If on a winter's night a traveler.] Novels keep beginning; before you have finished this book and turned out the light you'll have read eleven of them. (p. 641) [The] eleven beginnings are not equal in value, though most of them will cause any professional writer to salivate. Jorge Luis Borges plays fine tricks with logic and philosophy, and he has infected Calvino, who here tries to write about ideas instead of with them. But those sections of the story pass quickly...

[Italo Calvino chooses in "If no a Winter's Night a Traveler"] to play a wonderful game. He will make fun of the novel and novelists, the critics of novels and novelists, and the teachers of novels that have been sanctified by critics. He will nod knowingly at Modernism and its preposterous explicators. He will parody bad Germans, dyspeptic Eastern Europeans, the mad librarians of Latin America and even the Japanese…. He will end up, in spite of himself, writing a love story that...