Rating: 
Summary: Do you exist? Frustrated? Confused? Entertained?
Review: Calvino always entertains as he confounds. His career consisted of reaching into new territory, digging up new ways of telling tales, and of mirroring these tales to life and existence as we humans experience it. Calvino stands as a pioneer of storytelling. He tells new and fresh stories in an age when the story spicket seems to churn out redundancies or mere variations on themes. "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler" is one of Calvino's true masterpieces and an examplar of how he dug up these new forms and ways of storytelling.
First off, you (yes YOU!) are a character in this novel. You are directly referred to in the second person and called "Reader". The first section discusses how you approach reading and how you approach the subject of books in general. Both reading and books apparently obsess you, according to the text, and this obsession (your obsession) drives most of the novel's bizarre plot. Unfortunately, your obsession and your need for resolution gets foiled at almost every turn. Bad printing, unfinished stories, novels cut into pieces and distributed, deconstruction, stolen manuscripts, forgeries, arrests or fake arrests, revolutionary groups, censorship. Throughout the novel, all of these aggravate your need for a good story with a good ending. Resolution seems a far off dream in the face of a world that, beyond your control, keeps you from your desires. Each novel you find (you find ten of them in Calvino's book) terminates suddenly at a moment of excessive suspense. How do these stories end? Who knows? Enter the obsession. Along the way you meet another reader (referred to as "Other Reader") who you fancy and who then joins you on your quest to find the remainder of the unfinished stories. Will you end up in bed together?
You navigate many familiar and strange locales in your obsessive hunt: a book shop, the Department of Bothno-Ugaric Languages, a rather ornery and opiniated literary study group, a nervous publisher's office, a revolutionary translator's letters, the Other Reader's perspective, the Other Reader's apartment, the letters of a famous but frustrated author, a taxi - or a fake taxi, a prison - or a fake prison, a room containing a machine that analyzes novels, the Director General of Ircania's office - where you hear about brilliant censorship schemes, and finally, to a library. But you find yourself far away from your beloved Other Reader. Your obsession has sent you packing away, entangled you in bizarre governmental and revolutionary activities, and now you need to wake up. Hopefully you do. Do you?
"If On A Winter's Night A Traveler" contains too much juicy material to summarize. But it's disturbing in places, laugh out loud funny in others, heartbreakingly poetic in still others. It's far easier to experience than to explain. What it will do is make you think about reading and why people read, and then about stories, their construction, and why people write, and then about resolution, then about people, then about society, government, technology, translations, ideologies, connections, disconnections, love, beginnings, endings, and existence in general. It may help you to realize what is important in life, and, despite our need for resolution and our frustrated groping for unanswerable questions in the face of many forces we can't possibly control, we still manage to find anchors to help us through it all. After all, do all stories need a beginning and an end? You'll think about that, too.
If you read just one book by Calvino, better make it this one. After all, you're the subject.
Rating:
Summary: If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
Review: If on a Winter's Night a Traveller opens with a familiar scene. You are sitting down, reading a book just bought from a bookstore. Which book? Why, it's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller! And 'you' are the main character - the Reader - gradually becoming comfortable in your chair, immersing yourself in the story.
With such an interesting beginning, it is difficult not to be intrigued. Unfortunately, the full text for Calvino's novel is not available, and the burgeoning story breaks. We, the reader, are frustrated, but Calvino has thoughtfully supplied us with the beginning of another novel, and then another, and another...each story very, very compelling, each one breaking off just before the mounting tension of the carefully crafted build-up peaks. Chapters are alternating between 'you' the reader searching for the missing ends of the books, and the beginnings of the books themselves.
Each 'new' novel seems to build upon the themes of the previous, that is, themes of truth and reality, and the inherent flaws in our beliefs of these two fundamentals. Recursion plays a heavy part throughout, we are pulled deeper into stories that are completely, absolutely different on the surface, but deep down, at their core, it is the same story, or an extension of the previous, or a beginning to the last. The novel reaches its height of confusion when the 'normal' chapters of the reader searching for the novel begin to interact with the snippets of books found, but it is here where Calvino is able to pose the most difficult questions. He prods at our ideas of the reality around us, and the subjectivity of truth, and there is little we can do but nod and smile as we are taken on this metaphysical journey.
Calvino's writing style is hard to pin down. The different novels are from authors scattered all over the world: Japanese, Spanish, Italian, more. He also inserts a few made-up nationalities. Because of this, the novels are written in very different ways. They are almost samples of that cultures literature. A recurrent theme is that of 'awareness'. The characters always seem to know that they are characters in a story, and act accordingly. They mentally discuss plots points and actions, observing that it is of a benefit to the story that they do such an action or talk to such a person. This is a refreshing and interesting approach, and helps ensnare the reader - or the Reader - within the tightening plot. The sections where 'Calvino' is talking to 'you' are for the most part written in a familiar, intelligent style. At times 'you' seem to be governing the narration, at others, Calvino.
While the novel may sound very confusing - and occasionally it can be - there is a very great pay off. Too often with post-modern novels there is a tendency to leave the conclusion to the reader, or for the point of the novel to be that there is no point. Not so with this book. Halfway through we are aware of what the point is, three quarters of the way we fully understand, appreciate and agree with the ideas behind it, and by the end, on the second or third last page, we are left in absolute awe at Calvino's genius as he brings everything together in a way that is so absolutely perfect and right, there could be no other logical resolution. He gives us the ending and the closure that we deserve and that the book demands. It is almost as though he has told us a Truth, one that we always knew before, but he had to explicitly show us first. And I am glad he did.
Rating:
Summary: What's not to like?
Review: It's hard for me to imagine how anyone could fail to enjoy this book. In the hands of a lesser author, such an experimental project might have failed disastrously, but Calvino is never smug and never obtuse. In his speculations about readers and the nature of reading, the long experience of an accomplished author is evident.
Winter's Night is the story of a book that never ends, becoming a new story every time it seems to reach its climax, and of the two readers who try to pursue it. The snippets of fiction which make up the book-within-the-book are hugely entertaining - in the first, a member of some covert organization must flee when his cover is blown; in another, a billionaire avoids kidnapping through a series of complex false lives, only to become a victim of his own duplicity; in another, a man returns to the village of his birth to do battle with the ghost of a man his father killed. They are all completley self-contained, and after some time the reader stops being dissapointed that each one is cut off prematurely. We realize that it's the style that matters, and not the nature of the shadowy conspiracy which the protagnoist finds himself caught up in over and over. Eventually, the quest of the readers to find the complete book takes on the tone of an adventure story itself, involving actual conspiracies in foreign lands, disguises, duplicitous translators, and the very nature of truth in narrative.
What most descriptions of Winter's Night seem to miss is its charm. In his style, Calvino is often speaking directly to the reader, and the book conveys that sense of personal interest on the part of the author; it's a book in which you can make yourself at home. At the same time, it is penetrating in its analysis of the author-reader relationship.
To paraphrase Robin Wood on a different subject: If you do not like If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, you do not like to read.
Rating:
Summary: Depends on your reading style
Review: Calvino's novel is not for the average reader who enjoys a plot laid out in easy to read prose. If you only read to get lost in the narrative, then this book is not for you. If on the other hand you enjoy books of depth that stimulate your contemplation about life, you enjoy reading between the author's lines, and have a beginner's understanding about Postmodernism, then you will probably really enjoy this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Terrible Story
Review: I read many of the reviews here before I bought this book so I thought I knew what to expect... but the story just doesn't make much sense. The first chapter is intensely boring. The second and third chapters seem to have interesting stories that abruptly end. Of course these small stories (ten in all) are what are supposed to tie the main characters together. But what they mainly serve to do, as the author takes elements from these individual stories, is to create a confusing story that is heavily laced with philosophical thoughts and a limited amount of dry boring dialog. At page 200 I honestly still had not much clue what was going on in this book. I don't recommend this book to anyone.
Rating:
Summary: Great, depending on what kind of reader you are
Review: <Contains spoiler as to the very end of the book, which is completely irrelevant to its immense enjoyment>If on a winter's night a traveller is a book dedicated to the world of reading, readers, novels, stories, narration, publishing etc etc. Calvino has conjured up what seems like chaos but in actuality is a pretty organised reflection on reading. The book has two levels - the outer one is a book with you (the reader) as a character. The character has just bought a book by Calvino entitled - you guessed it - If on a winter's night a traveller. However, things go horribly and yet fantastically wrong. The text in the binding turns out to be the work of another author who you now want to obtain. And when you do, that turns out to be another book and so on, ten times. So, the outer story is you the reader pursuing an increasing number of novels (and in turn the very essense of the joy of reading) as well as a romance with a woman you met at the bookstore. Yes, this is a slight bummer for female readers but think of it as an excursion. The two pursuits are intertwined beyond recognition, naturally. The inner story is the 10 books you get to read, or rather their start, or rather Calvino telling the story of how you're reading them, or rather.... You get the picture. If you like your novels clean, with concrete plots, this is the exact opposite of that. And notice I'm not saying you won't enjoy it because chances are, you will! Because if you've ever felt an almost nostalgic hunger for narrative and have ever felt animosity towards works being academically over-analysed and pulled to parts, commercialised and produced in a seeming assembly-line as well as the proliferation of fake-ness in society in general (and all of these are satirised throughly in the novel), you'll find a book that appeals directly to your soul as a reader. And ironically, it will do this by having no coherent narrative and by over-analysing itself. Sounds like a heap of postmodern trash that was composed as a pretext to be "avant-garde" -- until you read it and see the satire and exaggerations that are used by a master storyteller to poke fun at our intertwined, sometimes censored, sometimes fabricated, sometimes enthralling world of ideas. Which isn't bad for an easy-to-read 200 pages. Of course, if you religiously your novels clean, with concrete plots then by all means don't read it and miss out an opportunity to go from the question "what shall I read?" to a more philosophical "why do i read?". But twill be better if you do. Oh and as a final convincing argument (and the spoiler), any novel that ends in you deciding you want to marry Ludmilla can't be all bad, can it?
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