If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is one of those books that’s interesting because of how strange it is, rather than because it’s enjoyable to read. The whole book is basically ten different novels cut off mid-story, tied together by a weird frame narrative where “you,” the Reader, keep trying to find the missing pages. It’s creative, sure, and I’ll give it credit for how self-aware and experimental(?) it is. I have to say, halfway through, I started to get bored. Once you realize the pattern—start a story, get invested, it abruptly ends. It starts to get very repetitive.
I also think the way he writes about women was very strange. Every time a woman shows up, I feel like she’s described as if she’s there to be gazed at rather than to exist. Ludmilla, the “Other Reader”, could have been really interesting, but she’s mostly presented as mysterious and sexy and hardly anything else. Even when she does have her own ideas about reading, they’re filtered through how the male protagonist sees her. It’s also worth it to point out that the book literally assumes the reader is a man:
“You can leave the bookshop content, you, a man who thought that the period when you could still expect something from life had ended.” (Chapter 2, pg 32)
Once you notice that, it’s hard to ignore how every story-within-a-story has men at the center and women hovering around them as lovers and/or muses. Although there are moments where it seems like he’s actually doing it on purpose, like when the narrator literally asks if being the “protagonist” gives you the right to sleep with all the female characters. I guess, in a broader sense, this pattern of male-centered storytelling feels like Calvino’s way of exposing how literature itself has been built around that perspective. But even if that’s what he’s trying to do, it ends up falling into the same pattern anyway? The female characters feel more like ideas than people, and the book kind of proves its own point. It’s hard to tell if that’s intentional or just the limit of what Calvino could imagine, but either way, it doesn’t sit right with me.
By the end, I think I respected the book more than I liked it ( although I definitely did not dislike it). I can say that I enjoyed the ‘self-aware’ aspect of the book, and it was unlike anything I’ve ever read before.
Discussion question: Do you think Calvino was actually critiquing the way women are written in literature, or was he just doing the same thing himself?