Review: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

The good

• It’s definitely a unique story: a self-referential story, in fact, that talks about a reader—you—trying to read the story. Every other chapter is the story itself, and the chapters in between are about you trying to read it. And each time you try to read the story, you get interrupted, and when you try to go back and continue reading, you find out that, due to various circumstances, you’re actually reading a totally different story. And then a story emerges in the chapters in between of your quest to finish those original stories, and this quest itself is, of course, yet another story.

• Reading a story in the 2nd person is an interesting experience.

• Some fun games with who the “you” really is in the story: you the reader, you the character, etc.

• Some fun games with who the author really is.

• Occasionally beautiful writing.

The not so good

• The concepts / themes of the book are great and novel… But they are repeated so often, they start to feel like gimmicks. Starting a story and then breaking off before finishing, only to find a totally different story is amusing the first time, makes you say, “ah, OK, I get it” the second time… But then it’s repeated eight more times. And those eight partial stories just aren’t interesting to merit reading page after page of them.

• The story between the story, of you as the narrator, feels similarly like a gimmick: fun, unique, and enticing at first… But then it starts to wear thin, and I found myself having to force myself to keep reading.

Overall

Probably worth starting if you want to get a taste of a very unique and unusual novel… But probably not worth the time to finish, as the last ~half of the book doesn’t add anything new.

Rating: 3 stars