Book Review: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller

If I were to tell you that this book is a novel, but not a story – would you believe me? Would you wander through its pages and marvel at the various dimensions you travel through? A spy thriller, a mystery, a romance – a series of fluid characters drifting in and out of the book. But you see them once and they never return.

You meet a girl in a bookstore – she is beautiful, but shy – an introvert whose world is books and their authors. You’re intrigued; she is also looking for the same books you are – perhaps this is the art of something tangible? Yet she is unimaginable, difficult to describe as the books you’re thrown headlong into – books you can never quite pin down. But yet you both search for the book that has a beginning, middle and an end. The book changes, it is never the same. One moment it is a romance, then a spy novel and a then a fable.it is never the same – and neither are you.

Italo Calvino is a little like Tolstoy in the fact that he likes to show off how clever he is – although without the smugness. I wouldn’t even know how to begin to describe the writing in this book – there are places and peoples – but what is the plot? You are the hero within this story that has no rhyme or reason. The actual setting of the story where you are tangible is intangible. The settings within the stories we read are more concrete, more realistic than the world in which the hero exists. It is part of the genius of Calvino – you, the hero, exist between worlds. There is ‘me’ who has read the book and now writing about it, then the ‘me ‘within the pages of ‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller’ who is desperately trying to find out the ending. But there is no ending. I am not the tangible thing within the physical pages. Only the characters within the stories make any sense. Even the girl – she is part of Calvino’s mysticism: a dreamer, a dare and an ideal doesn’t quite compute as I have earlier described.

So, how does one describe this book? How do I even review it as a book when it is so hard to pin down? Read it, by all means, I wouldn’t say it was the best book I’ve read this year so far. But it is certainly the cleverest.