Download Ebook If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino
Are you actually a follower of this If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, By Italo Calvino If that's so, why don't you take this book now? Be the very first person which such as and lead this publication If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, By Italo Calvino, so you can obtain the factor and also messages from this publication. Don't bother to be puzzled where to obtain it. As the other, we share the connect to go to and also download the soft file ebook If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, By Italo Calvino So, you may not bring the published publication If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, By Italo Calvino almost everywhere.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino
Download Ebook If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino
Book lovers, when you need a new book to read, locate guide If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, By Italo Calvino below. Never ever worry not to find exactly what you need. Is the If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, By Italo Calvino your needed book currently? That holds true; you are really an excellent visitor. This is an excellent book If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, By Italo Calvino that originates from excellent writer to show you. The book If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, By Italo Calvino offers the best experience and lesson to take, not only take, yet additionally discover.
As one of guide compilations to suggest, this If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, By Italo Calvino has some solid factors for you to read. This publication is extremely appropriate with what you need now. Besides, you will likewise like this book If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, By Italo Calvino to read because this is among your referred books to review. When going to get something brand-new based upon experience, entertainment, and also various other lesson, you can utilize this publication If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, By Italo Calvino as the bridge. Beginning to have reading practice can be undertaken from numerous methods and from variant kinds of books
In reviewing If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, By Italo Calvino, currently you might not also do traditionally. In this contemporary era, device and computer system will certainly assist you so much. This is the time for you to open the gizmo and remain in this website. It is the best doing. You can see the connect to download this If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, By Italo Calvino below, can't you? Simply click the web link as well as make a deal to download it. You could get to buy the book If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, By Italo Calvino by online and also prepared to download. It is quite different with the typical method by gong to the book store around your city.
Nevertheless, checking out guide If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, By Italo Calvino in this site will lead you not to bring the published book almost everywhere you go. Simply store the book in MMC or computer system disk as well as they are readily available to check out at any time. The thriving air conditioner by reading this soft documents of the If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, By Italo Calvino can be leaded into something brand-new behavior. So now, this is time to prove if reading can boost your life or not. Make If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, By Italo Calvino it definitely work and get all benefits.
Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
- Sales Rank: #10080 in Books
- Brand: Calvino, Italo
- Published on: 1982-10-20
- Released on: 1982-10-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .69" w x 5.31" l, .61 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 260 pages
Amazon.com Review
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narration--"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded." Italo Calvino's novel is in one sense a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader, ultimately end up married, having almost finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading. The Reader buys a fashionable new book, which opens with an exhortation: "Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." Alas, after 30 or so pages, he discovers that his copy is corrupted, and consists of nothing but the first section, over and over. Returning to the bookshop, he discovers the volume, which he thought was by Calvino, is actually by the Polish writer Bazakbal. Given the choice between the two, he goes for the Pole, as does the Other Reader, Ludmilla. But this copy turns out to be by yet another writer, as does the next, and the next.
The real Calvino intersperses 10 different pastiches--stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition--with explorations of how and why we read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other. If on a Winter's Night is dazzling, vertiginous, and deeply romantic. "What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."
Review
Avant-garde novel by Italo Calvino, published in 1979 as Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. Using shifting structures, a succession of tales, and different points of view, the book probes the nature of change and chance and the interdependence of fiction and reality. The novel, which is nonlinear, begins with a man discovering that the copy of a novel he has recently purchased is defective, a Polish novel having been bound within its pages. He returns to the bookshop the following day and meets a young woman who is on an identical mission. They both profess a preference for the Polish novel. Interposed between the chapters in which the two strangers attempt to authenticate their texts are 10 excerpts that parody genres of contemporary world fiction, such as the Latin-American novel and the political novel of eastern Europe. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Review
“[Italo Calvino is] one of the world’s best fabulists.” ?John Gardner, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
“Calvino is a wizard.” ?Mary McCarthy, NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
“[Calvino] manages to charm and entertain the reader in the teeth of a scheme designed to frustrate all reasonable readerly expectations.” ?John Updike, THE NEW YORKER
Most helpful customer reviews
95 of 97 people found the following review helpful.
The book lover's book
By A.J.
Often when I'm reading an extraordinarily well-written book, I marvel at how difficult and even agonizing the writing process must be; here's a book that makes me realize that this is a phase most readers go through and a challenge that confronts most writers. A charmer from the very first paragraph, "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" makes readers feel good about reading and writers feel good about writing.
Never have I read a book that communicates with and understands its reader so well. Writers like Nabokov and Pynchon like to have fun with their readers by posing literary puzzles, but here Calvino empathizes with the avid reader's feelings of frustration from interruptions, expectations, academic blathering, and personal efforts to reflect on literature.
The protagonist of this novel is none other than you yourself, the reader. The novel is about the protagonist's (i.e., your) attempt to finish reading the novel that you have started. However, problems keep cropping up, obstructing you from your goal: misprintings, mixups, interruptions, paramilitary operations, incarceration. Joining you in your quest is Ludmilla, a woman you met in the bookstore and whom you would like to date. Ludmilla has a sister, Lotaria, a feminist who thinks literature should be used to further her polemic agenda and represents the kind of "ideological cheerleading" for which critic Harold Bloom has so much disdain. Ludmilla, on the other hand, represents the perfect passive reader who reads for purely escapist purposes.
The novel's structure is entirely original and somewhat difficult to describe. It consists of two sets of alternating chapters; one set narrates your search for the missing remainder of the novel, and the other set consists of fragments of other novels you mistakenly pick up in your search. Each of these "other" novels is a brilliant piece of writing in its own right, each by a different fictitious author and with a distinctive plot and style. Just as you're becoming engrossed in whatever novel you're reading at a certain time, another interruption occurs, forcing you to resume your worldwide odyssey.
This may sound like a frustrating reading experience, but it's actually a lot of fun, as Calvino demonstrates that starting a new "novel" saves an old plot thread from wearing out. And just when things seem to start spinning out of control for the hapless protagonist (i.e., you, remember?), Calvino brings it all together in a narrative masterstroke that summarizes what all fiction is really about, which hasn't changed much since ancient times: it is simply about telling a story that hasn't happened in real life.
191 of 204 people found the following review helpful.
A conceptual review of a conceptual book
By Mike Stone
You are getting ready to read an Amazon.com review of Italo Calvino's book "If on a winter's night a traveller". Is your mouse nearby? Are you sitting in a comfortable chair? You're not slouching over the keyboard, are you? Sit up! Now, rub your eyes, close any windows containing video games, and read on.
-----
Besides Tom Robbins' "Half Asleep in Frog's Pajamas", this is the only book you've ever read written (mostly) in second person narration. 'You' are the protagonist of the story, and are directly addressed by the author/narrator. 'You' are the Reader. This is a technique that Calvino uses very well, especially when he manages to predict (or accurately tell) the circumstances around how 'you' bought the book, how 'you're' reading it, and 'your' thoughts and feelings concerning it.
You notice that this book has no story, per se. Instead, it is about Stories. The structure of the book is more important than the narrative thrust. A Reader (you) begins reading Italo Calvino's new book, "If on a winter's night a traveller". But the book is misprinted, and ends halfway through. So you head down to the bookshop, anxious to get your money back. There you encounter The Other Reader, a young woman also foiled in her attempt to read Calvino's new book. You both buy a new copy from the shopkeeper, only when you get it home, you realize it is not Calvino's new book at all, but something called "Outside the town of Malbork". Things continue this way, back and forth from thwarted novel to encounters with The Other Reader (who, by this time, you've developed quite a crush on). Along the way, you will meet many other shady literary characters, like The Non Reader, The Writer, and the Plagiarist. Do not be afraid of these men. They are merely devices to get you thinking about the nature of reading, the nature of writing, the nature of authorship, and a number of other significant post-modern issues.
This all sounds quite fascinating to you, but you still have trepidations. You have a copy of the book with you right now. To help quench your fears you open it up, seemingly at random, to page 197, and read the following exchange:
"'On the contrary, I am forced to stop reading just when [the stories] become more gripping. I can't wait to resume, but when I think I am reopening the book I began, I find a completely different book before me...'
'Which instead is terribly boring,' I suggest.
'No, even more gripping. But I can't manage to finish this one, either. And so on.'"
You think this is pretty good so far. But wonder, is Calvino right on either count? Would such a novel be "terribly boring", or "even more gripping"? Would you get frustrated beyond repair if the story kept stopping, every time it got good? You realize that you must decide for yourself before you begin reading the book in earnest.
Continuing your perusal on the same page, you read the following passage:
"I have had the idea of writing a novel composed only of beginnings of novels. The protagonist could be a Reader who is continually interrupted. The Reader buys the new novel A by the author Z. But it is a defective copy, he can't go beyond the beginning... He returns to the bookshop to have the volume exchanged..."
You stop, because you can see where this is going. This is Calvino telling you the genesis of this book. This kind of self-reflexivity sometimes gives you a headache, for a story within a story within a story (etc.) can sometimes be very confusing. You stop reading for a while to get your bearings.
You take a break by going to the fridge for a glass of juice.
Later, you flip the book open again, this time to page 218, and you notice this:
"Then what use is your role as protagonist to you? If you continue lending yourself to this game, it means that you, too, are an accomplice of the general mystification."
"Calvino is challenging me?" you think to yourself. "He doesn't think I am capable of following him through this labyrinthine world. He doesn't think I have the brainpower. But I do!" You are getting a good head of steam now. "I can read his book, no problem! I am a Good Reader."
You turn to page one, intent on starting and then finishing this book. And when you do, you'll realize that it was a rewarding, if oftentimes difficult and confusing, experience. It will have questioned your preconceived notions of what it means to read, write, to tell stories, and to listen to them. And it will do it in a (mostly) fascinating and suspenseful way, to make the ideas go down that much easier.
36 of 37 people found the following review helpful.
let yourself be manipulated
By A Customer
Read Chapter 1. Finished Chapter 1. Began Chapter 2. Scratched my head. Finished chapter 2. Began chapter 3. Began laughing at the game Calvino was playing with me. And wondering what he was going to do to me next.
I would never have guessed all the different roads I would go down as I read this book.
You'll fall in love. You'll pull your hair out. You'll throw the book across the room. And then you'll go pick it up again.
Any attempts to describe this book any better than this will either not be well-understood or will ruin the effect of discovering it for yourself.
If you are prepared to put aside your standard concepts of literary narrative and explore a new experiment, this book is definitely for you.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino PDF
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino EPub
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino Doc
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino iBooks
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino rtf
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino Mobipocket
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino Kindle
