“If on a Winter Tonight a Traveller” is the second book I’ve read by Italo Calvino. The first I read was the nonexistent night, which I liked more to be honest. I really like Calvino’s writing style. I find that he balances comedy and real-world humour with existential dread in a way I’ve never seen before in any other piece of media. My time reading this piece was hectic. In thinking of your lecture question about how the choice of physical medium and setting affects the book, I thought about the circumstances in which I read this book. The circumstances were hectic. Hectic in the book’s physical form because I got the book secondhand, and therefore found the pages filled with annotations, highlighted passages, and strands of someone else’s hair. But also hectic in setting, as I read about 200 pages of this book in the waiting room of a vet with a screaming cat (I am housesitting and the cat unexpectedly got pancreatitis, and also a blood infection the day after I started watching him). Beyond the physical medium and setting “If on a Winter Night to Traveller” also poses the question of how one’s mental state affects their interpretation of the book. I was not mentally prepared to read 260 pages. I was stressed for all of the reading. I finished the novel on the third day of pet visits at my wit’s end, and by the end, I grew to resent the book and all that it said. I didn’t care about the Reader, the Other Reader, I didn’t care about war, I didn’t care about Calvino, I thought this book was a waste of time. Had I read this book on a tropical vacation I don’t think I would’ve been nearly as frustrated with the run-on sentences and extensive commentary, I might even have enjoyed it. Something that stuck out to me was what the reader whom the main Reader meets in the library at the end of the book said about only properly reading a book when his eyes and mind drift. This is the kind of reader I am. When I have time to let my mind drift and truly think about the author’s words in my own words, I get a lot of value from books. When I reflect on them through my own personal experiences and let my mind drift to new places I feel a book has actually. However, when I forced myself to read, in the vet waiting room, with physical tension from stress in my body, sitting uncomfortably on a bench, like I did with this novel, I get nothing from it, except its completion. I think this thought would make an author feel his work is futile, since it says that it doesn’t matter how good your writing is, sometimes circumstances that are out of your hands will determine whether people connect with your book or not.
I realize I have barely talked about the actual plot. This book felt less like a story and more like a challenge of the physical act of reading. However, to prove I read it, my favourite character is Lotaria, the sister of the Other Reader Ludmilla. I still don’t understand if she was the woman in Ataguitania who was at the airport and also the prison. While her sister is clearly the epitome of the male fantasy, men find Lotaria annoying, which I love. She reads to learn and she dissects their work for her own purposes rather than just taking the words as they say them. This makes the men uncomfortable but I think it is wonderful.
Overall, a good book that was wasted on me.
“I got the book secondhand, and therefore found the pages filled with annotations, highlighted passages, and strands of someone else’s hair.”
Ha! Talk about the materiality of the book! I also appreciated your account of the setting in which you read it. Again, we tend to ignore our own context as readers, as though it were only the book itself (and the author, always the author) that matters, but yes, we contribute to what the book is, and if we’re not in the mood… the result is not always the best. So be it. Try again next time.
But I will say that I think this is also in part what Calvino’s book is also about. It’s about frustrated readers. It’s about how reading is not always fun: it requires effort, and you don’t always have that effort to give.
(Meanwhile, what about a question?)
“sometimes circumstances that are out of your hands will determine whether people connect with your book or not.”
Yeah, so true! Reading for me is sometimes like going to a painting show, interpreting a book through my own reading experience, even if it goes against the author’s intent, it doesn’t hold back a reader’s learning and understanding
That is honestly crazy! I can’t imagine how chaotic this must be, but this really shows how much our environment and our surroundings and state of mind affects how we read and interpret a book.