If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller Sits Down to Tell a Story
‘The first sensation this book should convey is what I feel when I hear the telephone ring.’
The first sensation this book appeared to convey to me was eerily similar to what I would feel post a neat concussion — foggy, addled and quite unsure of myself.
It had slipped my mind to read the blurb on the back cover before I picked up a copy of this whimsical, if a bit deranged, work by Italo Calvino, first published in 1979. That is just as well because my placid ignorance made me a passive bystander to the story for a total of five pages before I was hit in my kneecaps, shins and right clavicle by a comedy of errors, a love story and an espionage drama.
The novel opens with you, the reader, as the protagonist. Only it’s not the you reading this meagre attempt at a book review but the you in some distant future, buying a copy of Calvino’s ‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller’, reading through the first five pages with no obvious injuries to speak of, slowly, conscientiously, painstakingly, when you find yourself privy to a jumble of errors in the book’s signature binding.
What follows is you going back to the bookstore to have your copy replaced with an uncorrupted one and ending up with a different book altogether and a girl’s phone number. Suddenly brought together with this other reader, an adventure ensues through literary trenches, ten opening chapters of ten separate novels and the mystery of an ageing writer at the centre of it all.
‘If the end of the world could be localized in a precise spot, it would be the meteorological observatory of Petkwo.’
My immediate reaction after finishing the book was to stare at it, held in one hand, and an empty coffee mug in the other, my feet propped up on my desk, crossed at the ankles because that’s the only way to enjoy a good read, and imagine myself nose-diving into the residual dregs of my tea at the bottom.
The book is a study in inventive world-building in a way that doesn’t seem to take itself too seriously. The prose is rich, the writing style polished, and yet you often find yourself frustrated at a befuddling crossroads, holding a pan sizzling with frying onions. And that is, perhaps, where it shines the most — the bizarre.
It’s funny, ludicrous and downright preposterous in places. It’s a chaotic second-person narrative that cracks into the fourth wall unabashedly, grabs you by your unsuspecting collar and plunges you headfirst into an icy labyrinth. One cannot help but love every bit of the craziness.
The closest that I’ve come before to encountering such a charming mess was being knee-deep in a Murakami novel with a man talking to cats and leeches raining from the sky. While this one is not ostensibly a study in absurdism, it is quirky in how it’s a reader’s dreams and nightmares rolled into one convoluted manuscript.
“The novels I prefer,” she says, “are those that make you feel uneasy from the very first page…”
At this point, I suppose something has to be said about the darker undertones of the blight of literary commercialization overtaking the simple act of writing a book that pops out from between the lines. There. Something was said. Now we can talk about books and prisons and spies and all things where fun lies — rhyme unintended (mostly). The atmosphere created round you as you scratch your left toe, ankles propped up on your sofa’s armrest, is beautifully immersive, if a little tiring in places.
It’s a book that makes you want to read more books, find the author who is your Silas Flannery, and venture out on a secretly authorized mission to unravel the seedy alleys of sundry apocrypha.
To sum up a rather haphazardly put together write-up, if you’re looking for a light read to sit with on a park bench on a Sunday morning, wait a few more years before picking up this book. It’s not the right time yet.
If, on the other hand, you revel in your madness much like I do, prone to drinking tea in coffee mugs and staring into dead space, go right ahead. It’s an absolute wonder.
