Rating: 
Summary: A great excuse to love literature
Review: Calvino knows how to grasp you by your coat, obliges you to forget about evertyhing that surrounds you (thus: relax is the way the book opens)and get lost in this delightful experience of reading. This is not a book: it's ten books or a book for each reader. But, alas!, it needs of an intelligent reader, capable of writing the book with the author whilst you read it: a new, disruptive way to write, and an original, breaktrough reading experience
Rating: 
Summary: Ten stories for the price of one...
Review: Calvino is considered on of Italy's most brilliant living writers and in this novel he continually demonstrates his brilliance. However, brilliance doesn't always equate to penning a satisfactory novel. For me, this book always kept coming up short. The reader is lead down a successive series of paths (ten, to be exact); each a seemingly unrelated story held together by the slenderest threads of a common theme. Each story instantly grabbed my attention but none are explored beyond the initial chapter. Such is the structure of the novel itself, almost to the extent that this book could be rightfully termed an antinovel. It's a bit like that automobile commercial that moves from the chess piece to the chess game on a train, to the car traveling beside the train, to the young boy watching the toy train set, and so on. Entertaining fare for a sixty second advertisement, but hardly meaty enough to sustain a novel. If Calvino is out to demonstrate his virtuosity as a writer, he succeeds, but he does so at the expense of the reader who is left with the same feeling as after eating Chinese food-still a bit hungry.
Rating:
Summary: All in all, very good ...
Review: but perhaps too much too quickly. As much as he has a gift for wordplay and an ability to really get a monkeywrench under the hood of narrative, Calvino is weak in the development of the characters in this novel and his parody goes too far too quickly and, accordingly, is unconvincing, even as parody. Now a few qualifiers: The titled "false novels," which comprise about half the book, are brilliant, and neither of my two criticisms should be applied to these sections of the novel. It is only the interchapters, which describe the frustrated efforts of a pair of readers (addressed in the second-person) to reconstruct the fragments and false starts of the bogus novels, that feel underdeveloped. Part of this is due to the second-person narration, which requires a reader to do much of the imaginative work on their own (I do not fault Calvino for not developing -these- second-person characters enough, for that's the reader's job. It's the sparse supporting characters that feel unreal). The primary complaint I have with the second-person movements of the book is that Calvino seems torn between allowing the reader to run the story and running the reader through the story. Naturally, he has ultimate control in the situation, but it becomes a frustrating power struggle (and not the charming variety of frustration alluded to by the back-cover blurbers). Calvino compromises his second-person narration by mixing vague and aspecific details designed to enhance reader identification with outlandish walk-on characters which alienate. The final straw for me was when you, this frustrated Reader, winds up on a secret mission in a South American police state for the sake of the mystery novel. All that said and in spite of its flaws, If on a Winter's Night ... remains a tremendous mediation on reading.
Rating:
Summary: The best metafictional novel ever
Review: This is, quite simply, the best metafictional novel ever written. Even if you *don't* like experimental fiction, you will be charmed by the warmth and playfulness of Calvino's voice-- or many voices--in this novel. If you love the written word, please read this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Complex, brilliant, frustrating
Review: That this book is unusual is difficult to argue against. Mr Calvino leads you (poor reader) through a patchwork path of novels, or beginnings of novels, each of which through his skills as a writer he manages to captivate you with, and then, right at the point where you are his, where the story has you in its grasp, another twist and it is all taken away from you. Immensely frustrating, involving you in a way which always manages to keep you at a distance from the heart of his work until you are finally let in on the secret in the closing pages (or is it merely another construction to intrigue you?) Calvino has written something extraordinary which if you can last out until the end will eventually reward you for your patience.
Rating:
Summary: A Delightful Novel on the Art of Reading
Review: When I first picked up Calvino's novel I had no idea what to make of it. At times reading it seemed daunting, with its radically shifting narrative voice and its focus on characters called the Reader and the Other Reader. However, Calvino's skill at creating distinct worlds with his writing quickly put me at ease. The first chapter invites the reader to relax and focus into the reading that they are about to be immersed in. The novel contains not one novel, but rather ten miniature novels, each with a different fictional author figure, and each with a very different writing style (i.e. Mystery novels, Asian erotic literature, and Hispanic myths). Calvino's writing is brilliant and incredibly versatile, adopting each new style very clearly. Originally, I was intimidated by the overtones of the philosophy of literature, but I found Calvino's exploration of ideas including the reader's role in creating meaning for writing and the nature of the author very clear and fascinating. Overall, the novel is very different from any other novel I have encountered and it makes for wonderful reading material.
Rating:
Summary: Eternal Frustation
Review: I have not yet finished this book. It's taken me over a year to get to the halfway point. Why? This has to be the most frustrating book I have ever read. Every other chapter is the beginning of another book being read by the main character. Ever searching for the novel he wants to read, encountering publishing errors which have handed him one wrong book after another. With each new book beginning, I became engrossed in that particular storyline and then Mr. Calvino would change books on me. After reading three chapters I became so frustrated I had to put the book down for a week. I love this book very much and wish I could finish it. If you have a problem with cut-off stories, don't read this book, otherwise, enjoy.
Rating:
Summary: An Absolute Essential
Review: You have to read this fascinating treatise on reading and writing. I've seen others complain about the weak ending and the lack of structure, but for chrissakes, it's not a Dragonlance novel- it's avant-garde prose. But that doesn't mean it's not accessible. Unlike Andre Breton's shoelace knots of words that you have to dwell on endlessly to untie, Italo Calvino is so easy to read that the prose slips past you a little too quickly. But that doesn't mean it's not worth reading in the first place- Originally I checked this out at my college library and when I finished it, I bought a copy for myself and another copy for a friend. It's extremely hard to describe the book appropriately, but I'm hoping my enthusiasm for it will get my message across- Calvino's insights are worth the price of the book alone, and this fragmented narrative marked by stretches of crystalline, dreamlike beauty make what would normally be a dry work of literature philosophy into a vivid sensual book that I'll probably continue to re-read for the rest of my life.
Rating:
Summary: An experience, not a novel. Astounding in a wonderful way
Review: Italo Calvino's work is truly a masterpiece about the process of reading. But, more importantly, and watch out -- here's where I get metaphysical -- it is a meditation on human existence. Reading the novel is a journey, and I believe the reason why some people (particular other reviewers displayed here) find it annoying or unsatisfying, or even pretentious is because they are unwilling to explore. Calvino's work is not linear like other books. It is craggy, six-dimensional (if you will), complex, irritatingly cliff-hangish, and parallels the common human traits of indecision and want effortlessly. It takes reading and uses it, with subtlety mind you, to express theories about why we tick. Why we read is why we discover, in Calvino's eyes (whoops, there i go putting words in an author's mouth). I think it is very rash and displays an obvious lack of comprehension -- dare I say humanity, or even intellectual curiosity and capability -- on the part of the reader to call this book boring, or "cute" or "bad." Particularly, to complain about the lack of resolution in the novel has two negative effects for the complainer: 1)it demonstrates a total misinterpretation of one of the largest themes of the novel (the fact that maybe traditional "resolution" is not really what we're after as human beings, and perhaps that it just might not be of dire importance) & 2)a person who whines about Calvino not "tying up loose ends" at the end of the work must be someone who did not read the final page of the book! There is resolution; in fact, the end of the novel is the only perfect and fitting ending that could have occurred, for it stays inline with every other example of Calvino's ideas (which I will not enumerate here, for it will ruin the reading experience of anyone who has not yet read the novel). Calvino is completely consistent, and he is a master at making competent readers pleasantly confused at whether they are satisfied with their lives and not with the novel, or whether it is the opposite. I would argue that those who didn't think the ending was appropriate might just be trying to shield themselves from the realization that the novel has drudged up the fact that they are dissatisfied with themselves, not the work! The book, as I said in the title, is more of a journey, an experience than it is a normal novel, with plot, theme, setting, etc. It must be read with a few grains of salt, I grant you, and I will also admit to being frustrated with the novel's density more than once during my exploration of Calvino's world. However, this book is certainly unique enough to hold its own in a sea of mediocre fiction, unidimensional characters who never think beyond their own bodies, plots that are either so far-fetched or so flat that they predict themselves on page one, and themes that have been overexplained a thousand times. If nothing else, Calvino offers his Readers the chance to discover themselves for better or for worse and to analyze what it is within them that allows them the ability to communicate with others and form some inkling of understanding of their own soul and its minute impact on the cosmos.
Rating: 
Summary: Uncompromising mark: unresolved book
Review: Having intended to give this book one star the moment I opened its review page, I am not surprised to be here writing this, but I was astonished to find myself agreeing with the two (conflicting) [points of view]. But I was able to do so, because this novel did grab me the moment I opened it, and for a while I thought I was embarking on a literary adventure that might change my reading life for ever. In two senses it did - firstly, some of the episodes it relates I still think about frequently, such as the idea of someone "reading" a book by dissecting the word content statistically, and seeing which words come up most frequently - comedy, yet the kind of poignant comedy that Joseph Heller [may his soul rest in peace...and I am not even Christian] earned a name for. Secondly, at the time of its conclusion, it was the worst novel I had ever read - a frank and morbid comment that is nevertheless written in complete honesty. It had no end, and that really is the key to a novel - I do not mean the last few pages, I mean the resolution which builds from the first pages of the great novels. In the characters, in the prose, in the storyline. Not all great novels are strong in all departments - the Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James, has a pretty weak plot. But, man - this book is WAY off the mark. There is no prescriptive formula to be followed for a novel, and I welcome and embrace innovation and originality. But Calvino really ruined an otherwise lovely summer week for me with this novel - I invested so much effort, and got no return. After its conclusion, I wished that I had never read it, and still do. A shame, because "If on a winter's night" convinced me that Calvino was a proficient writer - and I can never read anything of his again...Oh well - other writers, other books. mrovich1@hotmail.com
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