If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler

I absolutely loved this book. I was captured immediately from the beginning and it was such a fun and enjoyable read. It felt like such a great escape from my life and it was like living in an alternate universe. At first I thought of the character ‘you’ as just that, a character. But the more I read, the more I began to imagine myself as the character ‘you.’ I’m a pretty easy going person so when the narrator would say something about how ‘you’ would react or think I would just be like okay slay.

I liked the idea of always chasing and looking for something. When ‘you’ was always looking for the different books or stories to find out how they end, it took us on this great adventure. I think that is a great metaphor for how we live our lives. We are constantly searching for happiness, stability, wealth or whatever is important to you and that can lead us on some great adventures with ups and downs.

I also loved how the actual plot was ‘interrupted’ by the stories that ‘you’ was reading. It allowed us to feel the disappointment of reading something and not knowing how it was going to end, especially when it just started to feel interesting. I could probably google this, but I was wondering if Calvino wrote the stories himself or if they were from or inspired by other authors. This format made it feel like ‘you’ was taking a pause in their life to read the stories and was then ‘resuming’ their life to find the end. It brings up the constant need to have closure and to have a specific ending. The reader’s need for this was so strong.

The first mention of ‘Arabian Nights’ is in Chapter 6. The Russian composer, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, wrote a piece inspired by this story called Scheherazade. In the story, an emperor is cheated on by his wife, and he decides to marry a virgin every night and have her executed in the morning. Scheherazade volunteers to marry him but tells him a story on the night of their wedding, leaving off at a suspenseful part. The emperor wants to know the end of the story so he decided to let her live for one more night. Each night Scheherazade would tell him a new story and this went on for 1001 nights. Eventually the emperor falls in love with her and she lives. This is my piece pairing for this book! I absolutely love this piece and was lucky enough to play the concert master solos while I was in high school. The solos are meant to represent Scheherazade telling her stories, just like Calvino writing the stories ‘you’ is reading in between the chapters.

My question for this week is: What do you think makes us want to know/have an end? Why is something leaving off in suspense so suspenseful?

If you skip to 44:55 in the video theres a funny surprise…