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?