On Monday 17 January 2022 we read Virginia’s Woolf’s diary entries of 1 and 18 January 1915 as part of a session devoted to “The new year and the future”, which also included Giacomo Leopardi’s “Dialogo di un venditore d’almanacchi e di un passeggere” [Dialogue Between an Almanac Peddler and a Passer-by] and Dante’s Canto X, 22-81, 94-114.

When and how does a new year begin? On the very first day of the calendar in 1915, Virginia Woolf wrote: “To start this diary rightly, it should begin on the last day of the old year.” Why? Because the day before she had received a letter, and the matter was still unresolved the next morning, when she received another one: “a letter from Mrs Hallett. She said that she had had to dismiss Lily at a moments notice, owing to her misbehaviour. We naturally supposed that a certain kind of misbehaviour was meant; a married gardener, I hazarded. Our speculations made us uncomfortable all day. Now this morning I hear from Lily herself.”

On 18 January, in the afternoon, Virginia and Leonard went out: “This afternoon we went over the houses in Mecklenburgh Sqre; which has led to a long discussion about our future, & a fresh computation of income. The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.”

These two ideas—that the year does not begin on its first day, but on the last day of the previous year; and that the future is dark—seemed interesting to start a new year of readings. In Woolf’s pen, both ideas are entangled in very trivial matters: a servant dismissed, a computation of income. Even if Leonard is there in both cases, next to Virginia and presumably in the same position and on the same level (“We naturally supposed…”, “we went over the houses…”), this—amusing, of course—mix of trivial matters and relevant points for reflection made us recall Paola Masino’s novel Nascita e morte della massaia [Birth and Death of the Housewife], which we read on 10 December 2021, in particular the extract where the protagonist writes:

“Thursday, March 9th. – War has been declared against us. […] If they start distributing food stamps, Zefirina will have such little leeway to cheat on the shopping expenses that it won’t even be worth keeping an eye on her anymore.” Do you know any diary written by a man—whether it is a real private diary written by a male author, or a fictional diary by a male character—that contains such computations? If anything comes to your mind, thanks for letting us know about them.

On 29 November 2021 we read pages from Italo Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (Torino: Einaudi, 1979), in particular the very beginning (pp. 3-4) and from chapter 7 (pp. 153, 155-156). We used William Weaver’s translation (Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1981; pp. 3-4, 153, 155-56 [this is not a mistake: yes, the page numbers are incredibly the same as in the Italian edition].

Calvino’s book was first published in 1979. It is a novel in a post-structuralist, post-modernist vein, one that plays very much on form and exposes, so to speak, the process of writing (or rather, in this case, of reading) and the artificial nature of literature. Yet it is also a book about the pleasure(s) of reading, and those amongst us who have read it in its entirety agreed that, once they began reading it, they could not stop.

There is a remarkable scene when the male Reader and the female Reader (two “functions” and two “characters” at the same time) mate – it is perhaps one of the least sexually arousing sexual encounters in literature. Here, reading and mating are the same:

“And you too, O [male] Reader, are meanwhile an object of reading: the Other [female] Reader now is reviewing your body as if skimming the index.”

[Listen to this quote in Italian:]

But they are also different:

“Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies […] differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous, divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost.”

[Listen to this quote in Italian:]

This is also a book about the beginning, or beginnings. When does a story begin? But, once again, what are we talking about? A love story, or a literary story? Or our love for literature?

“To begin. You’re [the] one who said it, […] [female Reader]. But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot,” writes Calvino.

[Listen to this quote in Italian:]

Have you read this book?