If on a Winters Night a Traveler Review
A ROMANCE OF THE READER
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June 21, 1981
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IF ON A WINTER'S Dark A TRAVELER By Italo Calvino. Translated by William Weaver. 260 pp. New York: A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book/ Harcourt Caryatid Jovanovich. $12.95.
SNOOPY sits at a typewriter, starts a story. ''Information technology was a dark and stormy nighttime. ...'' In Italo Calvino'southward new book a blocked writer stares at a poster representing this literary scene and wonders at the piece of cake confidence of the ''mythomane dog.'' Doesn't Snoopy know how hard it is to continue the one thousand promises made past such narrative beginnings, how inevitably the magic of an opening yields to the plodding dullness of a development? Calvino's writer dreams of a novel that would defeat this doom, that would sustain for its whole length the loftier excitement of waiting for things still to come up. It would be a book of beginnings only, and Calvino obligingly has written a version of such a volume. Calvino is an Italian author who has lived in Paris, and has recently returned to Rome. Architect of scrupulously imagined, evidently fantastic, insidiously plausible words, he occupies a literary space somewhere east of Borges and west of Nabokov. Borges dreams of libraries and Nabokov multiplies texts and commentaries, but Calvino, an editor for a large publishing business firm, pictures acres of vulnerable print, gathered into volumes simply constantly menaced with dispersion or vertiginous fault, ''pages, lines, words whirling in a dust storm.'' A graphic symbol in the new book sets down a pile of galleys very gently, ''as if the slightest jolt could upset the society of the printed letters.''
This character, an editor called Cavedagna, is both a comic portrait of the artist and an emissary from what Calvino calls ''the paradise of reading,'' the world of slow stories invented by the leisurely 19th century, where time, Calvino says, ''no longer seemed stopped and did not all the same seem to have exploded.'' Cavedagna is described as ''a little human being, shrunken and bent,'' not because he is, or because he talks like that, or even because he seems to have emerged from a volume where little men are ever shrunken and bent. No: ''He seems to have come from a earth in which they withal read books where you encounter 'piffling men, shrunken and aptitude.' ''
About of Calvino's works have been translated into English, the all-time known beingness possibly ''Cosmicomics'' and the extraordinarily delicate ''Invisible Cities.'' In ''The Castle of Crossed Destinies'' Calvino conjured up old and new stories, including those of Village and Faust, out of a pack of Tarot cards. In ''If on a winter'due south dark a traveler,'' he makes 1 story later on some other disappear. Scheherazade could not afford to end a tale. Calvino, in unimposing and amiable homage, pretends to be unable to start one - or rather, once started, pretends to be unable to keep.
His beginning tactic is to address us direct: ''You are about to brainstorm reading Italo Calvino's new novel. ... Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Permit the globe around y'all fade. All-time to shut the door ...'' At that place follow diverse instructions almost the lighting nosotros are likely to need, and the desirability of putting our feet up, along with an account of how we came to purchase this book, weeding it out in the store from the books we've always meant to read, the books we know we needn't read, the books nosotros regularly pretend we have read, and other threatening categories.
But of course Calvino cannot know who nosotros are or where we are (''you are on the bus,'' ''at the wheel of your car,'' ''you are at your desk'') and must therefore invent united states of america. He does this with a certain concern for our privacy - ''who y'all are, Reader, your historic period, your condition, profession, income: that would be indiscreet to enquire'' - but he cannot resist a guess or 2 virtually our temperament: ''You lot are the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything ...'' And with this, obviously, the reader is no longer the multiple invisible reader of the volume published by Einaudi and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, only a unmarried imaginary Reader, capitalized and manipulated throughout by Calvino: the hero of a volume near reading books. To be sure, nosotros read what he reads just his issues are not ours.
The novel he has bought, for example, is also called ''If on a wintertime's night a traveler'' and is ostensibly by Italo Calvino. But it begins on page 10 of our text, and evokes an atmosphere of secrecy and politics in a provincial railway station. The master of constabulary speaks to the narrator urgently: ''They've killed January. Articulate out.'' And at this indicate the Reader's book - but not ours -turns out to take been badly leap, to be made upwards only of the first 32 pages repeated again and again throughout the volume. He returns to the bookshop and complains. Ah yes, the Calvino book got mixed up with a Polish novel, ''Outside the Town of Malbork,'' past Tazio Bazakbal. In that case, the Reader decides, he doesn't care about the Calvino, he wants the Shine volume, since that'south the ane he's started. He also meets a young woman (Ludmilla: ''huge, swift optics, complexion of good tone and practiced paint, a richly waved haze of hair'') who has come across the same problem and has similarly decided to take the Smooth novel. They strike upwardly an acquaintance, and the double story now proceeds: of their search for a book that will continue beyond its promising kickoff few pages, of their uncertain, increasingly intimate relationship.
Surprise is part of the pleasure of this book, and I won't tell the story of its several failing and successful quests. Let me simply say that Ludmilla and the Reader, stranded past the publishers of Calvino and Bazakbal, run across eight more novels of unlike origins - Japan, Latin America, Belgium, Ireland and three imaginary countries -and that all of these novels are interrupted for one reason or some other: a further error of binding, suicide of the author, theft of the book, a sudden arrest.
Some of these books read like delicate parodies: ''The gingko leaves fell like fine rain from the boughs and dotted the backyard with yellow. I was walking with Mr. Okeda on the path of smooth stones''; ''the dawn, which remained suspended over the jagged edges of the forest, seemed to open to me non a new 24-hour interval just a day that came earlier all the other days.'' Others read like eerily filtered descriptions of acts of reading: ''The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a deject of smoke hides part of the showtime paragraph.''
These interrupted texts are themselves surrounded by an ongoing and more and more unlikely yarn about forgers, computers, censors and a group of revolutionaries called the Organization of Apocryphal Power, who seek textual truth through hijacking and violence. Information technology is on this level of the narrative that we meet Mr. Cavedagna and the writer mesmerized past Snoopy, forth with a sculptor who doesn't read merely uses books as primary material - ''artworks: statues, pictures, whatever yous want to call them ... I adhere the books with mastic, and they stay every bit they were ...'' - and a legendary Due south American Indian known equally the Father of Stories, ''a homo of immemorial age, blind and illiterate,'' who is thought past some to be ''the universal source of narrative'' and by others to exist ''the reincarnation of Homer, of the storyteller of the Arabian Nights, of the writer of the Popol Vuh, as well equally of Alexandre Dumas and James Joyce.''
The Reader, home at terminal from many adventures in pursuit of the volume he innocently started reading, is delighted to find that all 10 elusive novels are available in the library of his city. He requests them, only to discover that they are all on loan, out at the binders, wrongly catalogued, so on, and that the list of their titles, which is besides the listing of Calvino's affiliate titles, seems to constitute the kickoff of all the same another novel: ''If on a winter'south night a traveler, Exterior the town of Malbork, Leaning from the steep slope, Without fear of wind or vertigo, Looks down in the gathering shadow, In a network of lines that enlace, In a network of lines that intersect, On the carpeting of leaves illuminated by the moon, Effectually an empty grave, What story down in that location awaits its finish?'' ''Yeah, a novel that begins like that,'' another reader in the library says, ''I could swear I've read information technology ... the problem is that in one case upon a time they all began like that, all novels.''
Fortunately, the Reader's own novel, ''the novel to exist lived,'' as Calvino says, his romance with Ludmilla, progresses forth more satisfactory lines, and Reader and Reader, similar characters in a book, are married at the finish. ''But a moment,'' the Reader says to Ludmilla, who has asked him to turn out the bedside low-cal, ''I've almost finished If on a winter's nighttime a traveler by Italo Calvino.''
All this sounds rather fussy in description, but the book is both vividly written (eloquently translated past William Weaver) and thoroughly aware of ''the immensity of the nonwritten,'' the globe not on the page but beyond it, the world the page must point to if we are to care about information technology. ''Brand sure the page isn't in the shadow, a clotting of black letters on a grayness groundwork, uniform as a pack of mice; but be conscientious that the calorie-free cast on it isn't likewise potent, doesn't glare on the cruel white of the paper, gnawing at the shadows of the letters as in a southern noonday.'' These are not academic descriptions of the leaves of a book, they are meticulous evocations of a material globe equally solid and as specific as stones or flesh.
Calvino also mounts a running attack on various excesses of academic assay, the rooting almost in novels for codes and patterns and structures and issues. Reading is an endangered pleasure, and Calvino wants to requite us the pleasure besides equally talk about the danger. And yet two things do need to be said.
This book is a fantasy, fabricates a pair of dream-readers out of an engulfing nostalgia for the old modes of reading, for the pursuit of story and suspense, for the innocence which knows nothing of how books are made and unmade. It is mannerly, and funny, and very intelligent. But information technology is wishful. A wish is non an error, of course, only neither is information technology, in whatever ordinary sense, a truth. What are nosotros really similar, the readers of this review, and of this and that volume? What do we read, apart from The New York Times? How do we read?
And and then the book, for all its formidable wit and skill, is a confession of failure, and I think we shall get it incorrect if nosotros insist on converting all its credible misses into clever hits. The stalled writer, the one who is in love with beginnings, says, ''I would similar to be able to write a book that is just an incipit, that maintains for its whole elapsing the potentiality of the commencement, the expectation still not focused on an object.'' This is a desire, non a program. An expectation permanently unfocused will die, and an expectation that can't be focused is simply a disappointment. Of class, Calvino himself does focus the expectations he creates, and focuses them as few contemporary writers could. Every bit a volume about broken narrative promises this piece of work is impeccable. But its very success in this vein leads us to the sadness of its primal subject, the absence of the artist, Dickens, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, who could brilliantly keep the promises he made.
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