If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
by Italo Colvino
Translated from the Italian by William Weaver
c. 1979, 1981
Harcourt, Inc.: San Diego
260 pages

First of all, I have to apologize for the length of time taken to read this one. A whole week is way too long for me both as a reader and a new blogger. Alas, I was distracted this week by several events. An unexpected and glorious visit from some friends took up Wednesday, a night that I had set aside for reading. (And I wouldn't change that for the world.) On top of that, the research that I am doing at work seems to have found the beginnings of something that might be exciting (I say this with thinly guarded optimism). Therefore, I have been reading, but reading journal articles that hopefully help me frame what we have found in the context of the other research that exists on the topic (and in all the other slightly related areas that I got sidetracked to, because I am like that, and I can get pretty much anything right here at my desk. I love the National Library of Medicine.)

Anyway, assuming that most people don't care to read all the details of my thoughts on various articles from medical journals, we'll leave that out until I actually write a book about it.

To the book. I love this book. It is a book for readers. It is a book about the art of reading, the experience of reading and how greatly it can vary. It is about attitudes that people bring to reading and the essential purity and impurity of books. Loverly.

"The book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; it's subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists in its own incompleteness." (page 171-172) Beautiful.

Chapter One of this novel (if it can really be called a novel) includes a passage that sucks me in each and every time; it is so perfect. A trip to the bookstore in which you (for the book is written in the second person, addressed to a "Reader") are assaulted by the army of books there waiting there. As a reader and a lover of bookstores, I find myself facing this challenge each time I walk into Barnes and Noble carrying both my extensive curiosity and my meager finances and time. I think that here, the challenge of leaving the bookstore with any of the money I came in with is beautifully captured. An excerpt:

"...but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First... Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up to the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out: the Books You've Been Planning to Read For Ages, the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success, the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment, the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case, the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer... the Books that Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified. Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large, but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down and Really Read Them... and so on. (pages 5-6)

Really, sometimes I wonder how I ever make it out of there alive.

The structure of this novel is fascinating. In it, the "Reader" starts, and is interrupted in the reading of, 10 other novels, which are reproduced as he reads them. Alternating chapters include the narration of events between these reading, the finding and losing of the books, and his relationship with the "Other Reader" a young woman named Ludmilla. (He meets her in the bookstore, is there anyone else out there that is always hoping to meet someone new in a bookstore, it seems such a great place to meet people, and yet I never talk to anyone. blah.) The story is rounded out with an extremely complicated cast of other readers, writers and manipulators of books.

Each of the ten novels is interrupted at a moment of suspense. This creates an interesting effect, because like the character of the reader, I find myself wanting to hunt down these books and read the rest of them, just to find out what happens next. Of course, they don't exist, and the stories here are, alas, perpetually unfinished. (If you are someone who needs endings, this is not the book for you.)

More powerful however, is the commentary in the narrative chapters that talks about the nature of reading. Here I found many moments that resonated with me, explanations for why one is a reader, what one hopes to find, and does find, in books. The contrast of the hope embodied by some readers with the resignation of others, the escapeism of some readers contrasted with others who use reading as a way of being more intimately connected to the world. It really is a commentary on the diversity and humanity of the experience of reading. And also on the nature of novels as existing in some intersection between what is and what's not. I could quote passages for pages and pages here, but I think you should all just go and read the book. Because the point is made therein that reading is necessarily, in some ways at least, a solitary process, and me telling you about it will just not be equivalent.

Speaking of reading alone, this afternoon as I read the final chapters, I found myself very sincerely wishing that I was fluent in Italian so that I could read the original. This book is, among other wonderful things, filled with a variety of complex words and sentence structures. I am sure that the translator has put very real effort into finding the closest equivalents, but I am also sure that a book written by the word lover that Calvino certainly is loses more in the translation than other works might, simply because the complexity of the language suggests, at least to me, that much of the word choice was very deliberate, and therefore, impossible to really translate, since languages often provide only the most approximate or cumbersome equivalents for words that are beautiful in the original. But alas, I am not sure when I will have time to learn the Italian (or any of the other languages that would open worlds of great books in the original language...) But reading through a translator is like reading with someone else. I'm not sure I like it. Alas

Still, if you are a lover of books and the potential embodied in the act of reading, and not a lover of neat endings, go out and get this one. It's involved and fascinating, parts of it sensual somehow almost to the point of physicality. In the moments in which I was reading it, it totally owned me.

"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." (page 156)

Perfect.