Post-modernist. There, I’ve said it. It’s impossible to review this novel without using this term, so I might as well get it out of the way, and hopefully not come back to its constraining definitions.

Published in the original Italian in 1979 and translated into English shortly thereafter, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller is a boldly experimental novel that parades its cleverness, but tiptoes at times close to disappearing up its own narrative fundament.

It’s hard to describe what the novel is about, mainly because it is about itself. It begins with a discussion on what it means to read a novel, a discussion that continues intermittently throughout the book. What narrative structure there is concern events that the narrator describes as happening to the reader and your adventures in reading Italo Calvino’s novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Got that? This self-consciously subverts every tradition of story-telling, even though novels about novels are actually not that new. The structure of the novel sees the hypothetical reader begin reading a series of texts, each abruptly brought to a close, followed by an attempt to find the next chapter, introducing a new text at each attempt.  This quickly settles down to a predictable formula – we know the text is going to be incomplete and a new one will start soon.

I found this a hard read. Yes, I managed to finish it, but I was hoping to be dazzled. I have had this novel on my shelves for literally decades, always trying to find the right time to read it, and never quite getting there. My mistake I believe was to try and read it in short bursts on my commute. This is a demanding novel that needs the full force of your concentration, preferably with a pen and notebook to hand, not snatched ten or fifteen minute reads over two weeks or more. It just doesn’t flow as easily as most novels, fragmented as it is. I kept hoping at one point the pieces would click into place and a whole would be revealed to be so much more than the parts. Perhaps if I had read it more carefully that would have happened, but as it was it felt predictable and at times even puerile. Commentary on the experience of reading is interesting, but on its own does not have enough substance to create a novel, however much you mix it with many brief introductions to stories. What probably seemed revolutionary and exciting in 1979 seemed dated and forced in 2019.

I have enjoyed many meta-narratives before now, such as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas to give one obvious example, so I am certainly open to the idea, but the funny, clever, intelligent novel I was hoping for never turned up. Perhaps my yearning for a story is childish. One day I hope to reread If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller again, this time with the care it demands, and maybe then I will eat my words.