Rating: 
Summary: postmodernism and framestory
Review: If on a winter's night a traveller - se una notte di'inverno un viaggiatore. Published in 1979. It is a fantastic framestory. It has all the qualities you want in a book and at the same time the book demands something of the reader to. Both the reader in the book and us, the reader outside. I believe that this is another way of describing postmodernism and demonstrating the society we live in today. But as the book suggests you can interpret it in any way you want to. That is why Calvino is showing us all those different ways of reading a book, and interpreting a book. This book is my favorite and Calvino is my favorite author. No-one is like him, he has his own unic way of writing and viewing things. He is very intellectual, and at the same time funny, ironic, sarcastic, romantic, and a geometric genius.He has calculated everything down to the last detail, Im sure. I do not have time to write any more right now. I would just like to say that it has been a joy for me to read the other reviews. I did not read the English version, but the Italian. So I do not know how it is, but the Italian version is great. Whoever you are, reading my book comment right now, go get that book right now - you will never forget it, and you will learn so much about reading, how to read and thereby how to understand society. Calvino gives us the key to understanding and interpreting in the frame. And he does it through so many different point of views that you cannot misunderstand all of them. Enjoy and be captured in the authors geometrical web !
Rating:
Summary: Much much smarter than your average bear!
Review: What a marvelously unique novel. Absolutely no problem putting it number one on the top ten list of must read books. As well, I'm betting that once read, it will remain in a prestigious position on your all time top ten must-have-on-a-desert-island list of books. I know that instantaneously a number of books will jump to mind, and you will immediately want to disregard my prophecies as those of a raving lunatic. But the proof is the puddin' !
Read the book. Satisfaction guaranteed!
Rating:
Summary: Read a novel the redefines what it means to read a novel...
Review: One of the most wonderful, imaginative, complex, and lucid
books that I've read. Calvino takes the novel, the writer,
and the reader and fashions a lush, sensual, mysterious tale
around them. While I liked everything about the book, from
the highly humorous and clever plot to the poem at the heart
of the story, I was especially amazed by Calvino's ability
to shift from one chapter to the next to a nearly completely
different style of writing, as appropiate to the story's plot.
Many authors have mastered their style; Calvino mastered
style itself, and put it effectively to the service of his art.
Rating:
Summary: This book is so special, it actually reads YOU!!
Review: You have just begun reading a review of the book "If on a winter's night a traveler" by Italo Calvino. You may have come in search of this book based on the recommendation of a trusted literate friend. He or she probably recommended it to you with the particular sort of secret glee anyone enjoys when suggesting a little-known book of the sort that is sure to change your mind about the act of reading itself by the time you finish it. Certainly, this book *will* accomplish that--this book is so special, it actually reads YOU--your habits of reading, your responses and impatiences. This book in fact personifies the secret glee of knowing something--and not the something the reader does not know, but the something the reader knows best: him- or herself. Moreover, more remarkable first-rate novels have their beginning in this moderately-sized volume than in the entire careers of many fine novelists. This novel is a tour de force and a virtuoso's trick, an adventure in patience and a race for meaning. It all begins with a mysterious traveler in a station on a winter's night, but more importantly, it begins when *you* buy the book. From then on, it's a brilliant romp in second person through the world of books, with brilliant side trips into every major stylistic mode of the modern novel. Maybe your literate friend failed to mention that Italo Calvino, the Italian novelist, was one of the finest literary minds this century in *any* country. Maybe your literate friend neglected the need to connect him with books more familiar to you--for exmaple, by mentioning that Umberto Eco, author of "The Name of the Rose", is a great admirer of Calvino. Maybe you had no literary friend to make suggestions at all and simply stumbled on this page by web-browsing. In that case, I am delighted to be your literate friend, and I maintain that secret glee in saying: None of it will begin until you... Buy the book
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, concept-bursting writing.
Review: So this book. This book is my new bible. It speaks to me on every level. It inspires and excites me. As a writer and a reader. Italo Calvino has awed me. Has stunned my eyes open. He illicits a delicious self-conciousness by showing his hand. By pointing out which devices and tools are at play here. And by doing so, mystifies and confounds me. Each story forms another sector in a telescoping labyrinth that would disorient and bewilder Daedalus himself. But it's so lucid. But it's so lush. Like reading a lover's body, every subtle curve and salty flavour, every freckle and scar, I am learning this body of work. So that every time I am thrown careening around these wild, gorgeous turns, I learn to ride them. So that every time I'm thrown through these ephemeral plate glass windows, I will escape being cut, and will pass through unscathed and battered simultaneously. Calvino has encrypted his world and has decoded it in surprising ways. So that even reading a translation of the work makes me question thewholeness and faithfulness of what I'm reading. His thoughtful deconstruction is a minor transgression as he pieces the ideas together, culminating in a cohesiveness and re-structuring of what I thought I had read. And the subtlety and skill Calvino uses to toy with and enlighten the reader is nothing short of divine. I have come away from this book a changed person. Viewing the world through his cracked and distorted lens, but the ensuing patterns made make profound sense. I aspire to infect another, as Calvino has infected me.
Rating: 
Summary: maze of authorship
Review: Traveler is not a novel for everyone. If you reqiure a "good story," this is probably not it, if only for your use of diction. For fans of imagintive storytelling and interesting narrative (Borges, Grillet, things of this nature), it is essential. This is not a book in the tradional sense, of course. The main part of understanding and enjoying it stems from fully immersing yourself in the text; realizing the parallels Calvino is constantly drawing metaphorically regarding the hypothetical reader and hypothetical auteur - an incredibly vast meditation on writing and reading I will not get into here and leave you to discover for yourself. While the book plodded along at times [hence the 4], I can overlook this for Calvino's vision. Although I can say nothing about the original Italian, the English translation is fairly good from a technical standpoint, with many magical passages contained therein. Give it a try if you've come this far!
Rating: 
Summary: By page 50 I was bored
Review: I have read a moderate amount of experimental/post-modern fiction, and I have enjoyed a fair amount of it. However, I could not get into this book. Calvino certainly demonstrated an aptitude for writing in many different styles; I just wish he did more with it. This book was a collection of unfinished genre exercises tied together with a narative questioning authorship and authenticity. These are interesting topics, but they have been explored elsewhere in ways that I found more interesting.
Rating:
Summary: This is the book that changes what a book can be.
Review: After reading Dubliners and Ulysses, I thought that contemporary fiction had reached its peak of perfection, both in terms of style and prose. Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveller" redefined what a book can be and is the singularly most creative book I have ever read. Within a tightly constructed shell, Calvino has transcended the confines of the traditional novel, and written a book that examines what books, reading and writing are all about. Just as James Joyce captured the essence of the solitary human condition in the twentieth century in 40 pages in "The Dead", and T.S. Eliot did the same in poetry in "The Waste Land", Calvino has summed up the essence of reading and writing and the human need to communicate and love without telling one story, but ten, or rather 11, when you include the main story: the reader. I highly recommend this book> It absolutely changed the way I looked at books, and broadened my horizons more than any work I have ever read.
Rating:
Summary: If on a winter's night a traveler... or not?
Review: One definition of metafiction is "Fiction that deals, often playfully and self-referentially, with the writing of fiction or its conventions." That could pretty much describe Italo Calvino's "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler," a gloriously surreal story about the hunt for a mysterious book.
A reader opens Italo Calvino's latest novel, "If On A Winter's Night A Traveller," only to have the story cut short. Turns out it was a defective copy, with another book's pages inside. But as the reader tries to find out what book the defective pages belong to, he keeps running into even more books and more difficulties -- as well as the beautiful Ludmilla, a fellow reader who also received a defective book.
With Ludmilla assisting him (and, he hopes, going to date him), the reader then explores obscure dead languages, publishers' shops, bizarre translators and various other obstacles. All he wants is to read an intriguing book. But he keeps stumbling into tales of murder and sorrow, annoying professors, and the occasional radical feminist -- and a strange literary conspiracy. Will he ever finish the book?
In its own way, "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler" is a mystery story, a satire, a romance, and a treasure hunt. Any book whose first chapter explains how you're supposed to read it has got to be a winner -- "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, "If On A Winter's Night a Traveler." Relax. Concentrate." And so on, with Calvino gently joking and chiding the reader before actually beginning his strange little tale.
As cute as that first chapter is, it also sets the tone for this strange, funny metafictional tale, which not only inserts Calvino but the reader. That's right -- this book is written in the second person, with the reader as the main character. "You did this" and "you did that," and so on. Only a few authors are brave enough to insert the reader... especially in a novel about a novel that contains other novels. It seems like a subtle undermining of reality itself.
It's a bit disorienting when Calvino inserts chapters from the various books that "you" unearth -- including ghosts, hidden identities, Mexican duels, Japanese erotica, and others written in the required styles. Including some cultures that he made up. Upon further reading, those isolated chapters reveal themselves to be almost as intriguing as the literary hunt. Especially since each one cuts off at the most suspenseful moment -- what happens next? Nobody knows!
It all sounds hideously confusing, but Calvino's deft touch and sense of humor keep it from getting too weird. There are moments of wink-nudge comedy, as well as the occasional poke at the publishing industry. But Calvino also provides chilling moments, mildly sexy ones, and a tone of mystery hangs over the whole novel.
At times it feels like Calvino is in charge of "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler"... and at other times, it feels like "you" are the one at the wheel. Just don't put this in the stack of Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First. Pure literary genius.
Rating:
Summary: Learn a lesson from Math
Review: Like with most thoughts, ideas, and novels, you get exactly what you put in; it's a mathematical equation of literature: Imagination= Enjoyable read. It's my suppostition that most of the one star reviewers must be people of little imagination, who expect the author to lead them by the hand and intimately explain everything. If this is your expectation of literature, maybe I can suggest the book "My Day At The Zoo" to be more atuned to your limited imagination. As for others who are adventurous enough, and who have eliminated all expectations for a novel, this will be an amazing travel. And thats exactly what this book is, a travel through personalities, places and dispositions; you will meet a well created cast of characters who somehow seem to reflect something thats hinting inside all of us.
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