Rating: 
Summary: Clever, but at time self-conscious - sometime beautiful.
Review: I began reading this novel with ery few preconceptions, having never read a Calvino novel before. What followed was what can olny be described as a romp through modern day literature.If we wanted to, we could find personal meanings in the stories - I'm sure some of us have. The chracters, situations, moods, themes and various styles of the stories have aroused thoughts and ideas in our mind that may never have come to anothe. As one of the Readers ion the last scene states - 'If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that th etext suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, fromimage to image, in an itinerary or reasoning and fantasits that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it.' (P.S. I feel that Calvino repests names in various stories because we have been trained in a liberal humanist fashion to pick up these links, and analyze them. I'm sure Clavino would have a good laugh if he saw my poor, misguided literature class attempting to 'explain' his whimsical stories!)
Rating: 
Summary: Amazing examination of what it means to read a novel.
Review: You have to love the way Calvino messes with the structure of a novel. This book is amazing. It provides a new way to define a novel. It's great how the novel addresses the reader. And, it has one of the best endings of a novel, ever!
Rating:
Summary: Opened my eyes
Review: I remember picking this book up 3 years ago in a tiny bookshop in London for no other reason than the title intriguied me. It was the middle of summer and too hot to do anything but lie back and relax. I got home the next day and sat in my room with he window open and began to read. I didn't stop until I had finished it and then I read it again. This book was a watershed for me. I was 15 when I first read it and at the time I thought that Terry Pratchet was the greatest author in the world - now I know better. Since then I have discovered literature and the beauty of having a book challenge you and the satisfaction of meeting that challenge. This is a beautiful book that ranks up there with 'Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance' by Robert M Prisig and 'Life: A Users Maual' By Georges Perec as one of the greatest books ever.
Rating:
Summary: clever, convoluted, exasperating
Review: If on a Winter's Night can be read forwards, backwards, any way at all. Each chapter/installment contains a wealth of insight and opinion about writing and the writerly. As literature, the plot is, well, implausible and the story peters out at the end. Though a must-read, it is not for a mere pleasure-seeker
Rating:
Summary: a book-lover's book
Review: i was browsing through the bookstore & looking for something new & interesting to read. i'd read Calvino's first book, The Path To the Nest of Spiders, in college, & enjoyed it, so when I got to the C's in the fiction section i pulled off a copy of this book. As soon as i'd read the first section, describing the reader's experience in the bookstore, i knew i had to read this book. when the reader in the book is leaving the bookstore, looking forlornly at the stacks of other books, and calvino writes "or rather, it was the books that looked forlornly at you, the way the dogs at the pound look at their friend whose owner has come to bring him home." (not sure if that's the exact quote, but you get the idea...) this book is a permanent fixture on my bedroom bookshelf; i've read it 3 times already and expect many more hours of enjoyment from it! if you love to read, you will relish this story. it's the most creatively formed novel i've ever read, yet still very accessible.
Rating:
Summary: clever, infuriating, absorbing
Review: started out being frustrated, then amused, then totally absorbed. some of the "first chapters" are very clever- the businessman collector of mirrored instruments is my favorite. but the book bogs down towards the end as cleverness wears into exhaustion. still a trip worth taking.
Rating:
Summary: a book to start reading
Review: Mario Vargas LLosa said that "no one should start by reading the classics". Perhaps many educative systems fail as they do just the oppositte. You should start reading by pleasure. Easy things, nice reading, imaginative. This is one of the first books I would use in schools. It's one of the greatest pleasures in reading I ever had. Perhaps the story is not perfectly polished. But you just get hooked untill the last page. Subtelty, pulls all the little springs inside your mind that makes the act of reading a pleasure.Imagination and joy at full speed! Enjoy it!
Rating:
Summary: Litterature as math
Review: This book is a work of a truly amazing mind (but not the heart): it reflects on itself, makes the reader also the character! However, something is lacking here: the author becomes too detached, diappearing in an endless mirror-like images. It leaves you somehow with an impression of having read a work of maths and not the bell-lettre: you learn fast that the next novel is going to be interrupted at the beginning and so stop reacting emotionally.
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: Words that will change the way you think!!!
Review: Simply put, this is the greatest novel I have ever read. Having read it several times upon its initial purchase years ago, I find myself picking it up just to catch glimpses at chapters and words. Words that leave the page to stay in your soul, or that dip underneath the table and hide to taunt you at a later time. Do yourself and your way of looking at the world a favor and read this book.
|
