“I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read,” a third reader says, “but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext.” (255)
I first read this book in high school as part of a unit on metafiction, 4 years ago. When I think about rereading and rewatching my favourites, or ones that I haven’t seen in a while and want to go through with fresh eyes, I think about the above quote from this book. I thought it’d be appropriate to reread this for this class. And writing this has me reflecting on how I’ve changed as a reader since then.
More than anything, this book reminds me of being a reader. Before the moulding of the protagonist of chapter 1 into the male Reader and the whirlwind worldwide romance, the first chapter is still so directly meta and directed to the reader. “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler” (3). And painstaking detail about the conditions to read in: the body position, like “curled up or lying flat” (3), the location, “an easy chair, on the sofa, in the rocker, the deck chair, on the hassock” (3) the proper lighting so you get “absorbed in the book” (4). Maybe not what I do exactly, but I think it understands all the routines necessary to even start reading. Same for page 5, which is a direct blow to anyone with huge backlogs and plan-to-read lists for various reasons: “Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Have Read Them, Too” or “Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer” are particularly funny.
Reminded of my status as a reader, it brings to mind the question of what it means to read. And I think about the culture around reading these days and the proliferation of sites like Goodreads or Letterboxd. Reading or watching has been gamified, where you log as many things as you can so your completed books or movies number goes up. “I’ve got to read 50 books this year!” “Watch a film a day!” And so on. Admirable goals, but maybe just checking off boxes and defeating the purpose of going through all those different works. Though I admit I’m judgmental here and can’t truly know for what reason they read.
But for me, at least, “reading a book” can be much more than that, as shown by this book. Reading doesn’t necessarily have to be from start to finish, or even the entire thing, just like how we only read Combray out of Swann’s Way and moved right on. Calvino shows that a thrilling read can be made where half the book is made of 10 unfinished books, and the other half is the grand adventure about metafiction and reading. When I first read this book, I focused on the metafictional aspect, as that was most relevant to my English class; this time around, I paid more attention to those first chapters of books. And the fragments are excellent on their own: like the shrouded noir of “If on a winter’s night a traveler (chapter) or the diary of “Leaning from the steep slope”, or the South American fiction of “Around an empty grave” that reminded me of some of the readings in this very class. Like in the above quote, I always see new aspects of both the book and myself every time I reread.
Nowadays, I don’t identify with the overtly gendered Good Ending, although I get the gendered and masculine framework that Calvino works with as described in the lecture. It’s parallel with how the seventh reader describes stories from “ancient times” (259), the hero marrying the heroine, and thus have a sort of perceived universality when connecting those ancient times to the present. I might’ve been closer to him 4 years ago, but not now. However, I now understand a bit more about why the story and the Reader gets a good ending, even after the unsatisfying quest of all those books, besides the default explanation of “stories with happy endings end like this”. Reading is the good ending, and it’s a joy to pick up another book, finished or not, or the same book again.