"If on a winter's night a traveller...."

Blessedly, this post has nothing to do with things economic and catastrophic. Nope, rather, it's the benevolent me, wishing to share some magnificent Italo Calvino with you. No, not a wine (tho it does sound rather delicious) - he's a 20th C Italian novelist, and beyond brilliant imho.

"If on a winter's night a traveller...." is perhaps Calvino's best-known work. Published in 1982, and set in a sort of Europe of our dreams, full of oddly familiar but just-out-of-reach cities and landscapes, it's an amazingly complex and layered work, seemingly almost willfully designed to frustrate the reader at every turn. For one thing, each brilliantly constructed chapter ends on some note of high suspense and anticipation, having slowly drawn the characters into a dangerous or mysterious drama. But, as the next chapter begins, you are confronted by an entirely new story, with new characters, in a completely different locale, perhaps even in a completely different time. The thread of the earlier drama disappears, to be replaced by this new thread, which, like the prior chapter, slowly and skillfully build to a climax only to have yet another new novel replace it yet again as the chapters shift. This goes on for chapter after chapter. And each chapter is written in an entirely different stylistic mode, as if by entirely different authors.

Weird huh? But there's more. As things unfold, it seems as though the book's chapters change due to a binding error at the printer's, not due to Calvino's design. Thus parts of multiple different books have been incorrectly bound together. Or have they? Are the chapters one book in the wrong order? Different books? The same characters imagined in a different time and place, in different circumstances?

And here is a third, and really mind-blowing, wrinkle. As you, the Reader, read the book, you discover that there is another Reader also reading the same book, who you meet in a bookshop when wishing to return the mis-bound book. Returning home you wonder who she is, as she was very attractive, and you are drawn to her. So now, as the rest of the novel(s?) unfold, an emerging love affair develops, as the twin Readers find themselves reading the novels but increasingly also thinking about each other as reading the same novel at the same time brings them ever closer together...

Yikes! I urge you to hop onto Amazon and get it now! Or send it to your Kindle. Or walk to the bookstore (where you may meet the Other Reader!)

Here are some excerpts available for browsing, courtesy of Google Books. Read the introduction for sure!!! A thing of beauty, and contains the best and funniest description of the book-buying experience ever written....

http://books.google.com/books?id=bkv55gIG4zgC&dq=if+on+a+winters+night+a+traveller&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=El2tSfaKNOCbtweP76GIBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result