"You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclusion you have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even international affairs.
What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious."
With the first chapter, Calvino introduces you to yourself, as “You, the Reader,” which is the perspective you will have for most of the novel. Calvino’s description of you is that of a careful, conservative person – you try to avoid disappointment at the cost of your own pleasure. However, he writes that you allow yourself to find joy in books, which have no serious risk of disappointment. Through this depiction, Calvino implies that your character has not fully experienced life for fear of regret – particularly with romantic relationships.
It is important to note that even in the first few pages, Calvino allows for distance to be created between the character of the reader and the actual reader of the book. You yourself may not be someone who "no longer expects anything of anything" (4). You may or may not smoke cigarettes, you may be young or old, and you may be reading in a number of positions. This may create discomfort for the reader, as if Calvino were making assumptions about his readership having certain characteristics. This discomfort is intentional and part of Calvino's postmodern style.
"Reader, prick up your ears. This suspicion is being insinuated into your mind, to feed your anxiety as a jealous man who still doesn't recognize himself as such. Ludmilla, herself reader of several books at once, to avoid being caught by the disappointment that any story might cause her, tends to carry forward, at the same time, other stories also..."
In this quote, the narrator implies that Ludmilla reads multiple books at the same time to hedge her bets; if one book disappoints her, she will have other stories that she is invested in. Your character initially worries that she does the same thing with her romantic partners. This assumption demonstrates how many characters in the book are characterized by the way that they read. While Ludmilla wants to leave books unfinished and start others, showing her adventurousness and avoidance of disappointment, the Reader's strongest desire is for the structure and catharsis of reading a book from start to finish. Other characters will express desires to mechanize book reading and writing, showing their hunger for progress and domination; still others will reveal that they yearn for simpler times when they could read simply for pleasure, demonstrating their lack of life satisfaction.
"Watch out: it is surely a method of involving you gradually, capturing you in the story before you realize it — a trap. Or perhaps the author still has not made up his mind, just as you, reader, for that matter, are not sure what you would most like to read: whether it is the arrival at an old station, which would give you a sense of going back, a renewed concern with lost times and places, or else a flashing of lights and sounds, which would give you the sense of being alive today, in the world where people today believe it is a pleasure to be alive."
Calvino ironically warns you, the reader, not to become too invested with his story – otherwise, you will be manipulated by him. In If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, you are not in control of any events, and are at the mercy of the author's designs. However, rather than dissuade you from reading any further, Calvino warns you to pay close attention to the twists and turns in the plot, so that you will be able to safely navigate (and enjoy) his book.
He uses the word "trap" to describe what he, the author is doing. This word will recur throughout the book as a motif. The reader's feeling of being trapped by the pre-determined the path of the narrative is paralleled by the characters of many of the stories-within-a-story referencing being trapped by various things ranging from physical kidnapping to a government job.
“This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it..."
This quote appears in the story-within-a-story "If on a winter's night a traveler." The narrator of the story wants to be inconspicuous, and to do so he thinks that he must get rid of the mysterious suitcase he was supposed to hand off to a stranger earlier that day. However, he realizes that in taking action to get rid of the suitcase, he would be drawing attention to himself. He is left with a philosophical conundrum: he feels that the only thing that would truly fix the situation is to go back in time and erase things, but he realizes that he cannot do that and furthermore that time continues to move forward. One cannot escape their past, nor erase their discomforts, and other characters such as the narrators of the stories-within-a-story "Looks down in the gathering shadow" and "What story down there awaits its end?" must grapple with this fact as well. In short, one's actions, or inactions, have lasting consequences.
“Lovers' reading of each other's bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeat itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against moments, recovering time?”
In If on a winter's night a traveler, the reader's main conflict is wanting to finish the books that he has begun. He is fixated on the structure of books being linear: a start, a middle, and finally catharsis through a climactic ending. Since he hasn't gotten that climax and closure, he feels frustrated and confused. This quote pushes the reader, both the character and the actual reader of the novel, to interrogate their beliefs on reading, sex, and life. The reader (the character) seems to have the preconceived notion that the best way to read, to have sex, and to go about life in general, is to rush toward completion. However, Ludmilla, his sexual partner in this encounter, enjoys starting many books at once, reading different books in different parts of the house, and changing her mind about the kinds of books she likes. Through this sexual encounter and the extended metaphor used to describe it, the reader is exposed to the idea that reading may be more pleasurable when reaching the climax and the end of the story is not the main focus.
“Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”
If on a winter's night a traveler is considered a postmodernist novel. Postmodernist writers often parodied and challenged literary styles of the past, particularly modernist literature (written between the 16th and early-20th century). While the literary styles and genres pastiched through the stories-within-a-story in If on a winter's night a traveler span modernism and postmodernism (Calvino has said the styles of those stories were strongly influenced by the writers Bulgakov, Kawabata, Tanizaki, Rulfo, Arguedas, Borges and Chesterton), this quote takes Calvino's analysis and critique of past literature back even further, to ancient times. The seventh reader challenges the main character of the novel about whether a book must have a beginning and an end, as the reader has believed and sought throughout the book. Rather than resulting in a climactic changing of views, the reader decides at this moment to marry Ludmilla so that he can achieve a feeling of closure. Thus, the novel has something of an ironic ending; while the plot, structure, and narration were so innovative, it still ended in an extremely traditional way.
“It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible”
Chapter 8 differs from the other numbered chapters in If on a winter's night a traveler; the other chapters are narrated in the second person and follow the character of the reader, while Chapter 8 is narrated in the first person through the diary of Silas Flannery. Flannery is experiencing writer's block after a prolific and popular career as a writer, and this writer's block causes him to question the very notion of authorship. In this quote, Flannery reflects on a story about how the Koran was written. He asserts that ideas or stories are not sacred until they are written down. This means that writers have great power to influence readers, a theme that will be forwarded later in Chapter 10 when the reader meets with Arkadian Porphyrich to discuss banned books.
“You fight with dreams as with formless and meaningless life, seeking a pattern, a route that must surely be there, as when you begin to read a book and you don't yet know in which direction it will carry you. What you would like is the opening of an abstract and absolute space and time in which you could move, following an exact, taut trajectory; but when you seem to be succeeding, you realize you are motionless, blocked, forced to repeat everything from the beginning.”
This quote, which occurs early in the book, shows that people seek in books what they desire from life. From the reader's desire to read books with a clear beginning, middle, and end, and with a "taut trajectory" that must be followed, it is clear that he feels a lack of control and forward motion in his life. Calvino explicitly states this sentiment by writing "You fight with dreams as with formless meaningless life, seeking a pattern." Throughout the book, the reader is challenged by having to begin books that stop abruptly at a climactic moment, forcing him to reckon with his desire for consistency and closure. Interestingly, by the end of the book, he has not shifted his views. He still wants a traditional storybook ending, and he achieves it by marrying Ludmilla.
“You're the absolute protagonist of this book, very well; but do you believe that gives you the right to have carnal relations with all the female characters?”
Readers and scholars have critiqued If on a winter's night a traveler for its portrayal of females merely as secondary characters and romantic objects. However, this quote shows that Calvino has been purposeful in creating a story and a main character espousing this simplistic view of women. This quote turns the misogynistic criticism from the author to the reader and publishing industry. If readers want to view female characters as sexual objects and vapid parallels of one another, Calvino gives them a story that does just that. His tongue in cheek statement "do you believe that gives you the right..." challenges a reader's preconceived notion that the way they view females, and the way that females are viewed by society as a whole, doesn't shape the way female characters are written by even the most socially conscious writers.
“Furthermore, Professor Uzzi-Tuzii had begun his oral translation as if he were not quite sure he could make the words hang together, going back over every sentence to iron out the syntactical creases, manipulating the phrases until they were not completely rumpled, smoothing them, clipping them, stopping at every word to illustrate its idiomatic uses and its commutations, accompanying himself with inclusive gestures as if inviting you to be content with approximate equivalents, breaking off to state grammatical rules, etymological derivations, quoting the classics."
Italo Calvino was quite aware of the difficulties of translation. While he was primarily an author, he also did some translation work in Italian, and he worked closely with translators to have his books published in other languages. It is likely that you are reading If on a winter's night a traveler in translation, making this quote even more interesting. In this quote, Calvino makes it clear that translation is not only difficult, it is imprecise and imperfect. There are always pieces of context that would be necessary to fully understand a work in another language, but giving all of the context, rules, and explanations takes away from the flow of the story itself. A translator must be satisfied with a middle ground, where the reader gets the best idea of the author's meaning and style while still being allowed to immerse the story. A reader, in turn, must acknowledge that when reading a translation (or, as scholar Stuart Hall argues in his theory of encoding and decoding, when reading any work) something will be lost between what the author intended and what the reader understands.
