Hey there, and welcome to the discussion on If On A Winter's Night a Traveler... by Italo Calvino. Or is it? Maybe it's actually a totally different book by an obscure Polish author...
Let's start with something easy: What did you think of the structure of the book? Did you find the starting and stopping stories in different styles engaging? Frustrating? Fun? Pretentious? Revelatory?
When I first read this book, back in high school, it blew my mind, It was the first book that ever made me think "Whoa, you can do that with words on a page? Who knew?" I'd always thought the purpose of a book, a story, was to have a beginning, middle and end, and to take you from said beginning to said end. This was the first book that challenged that and yet kept me engaged and reading from beginning to end.
This time, since that burst of novelty has worn off, was a bit different. I still love the book, and am finding new things that I hadn't noticed before, but I'm finding the prescriptive "You, the reader, are doing this" a little too.. cutesy? Pleased with itself? Something like that.
I'm also finding myself a little annoyed at points in the "chapters" of the various books where he stops presenting the words of the books themselves and starts talking about the style of the books -- for example, in "Looks down in the gathering shadow", "I'm producing too many stories at once because I what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories...." He's having all the authors break the fourth wall, pointing out in the middle of the story that it is a planned, calculated story, that everything on the page is there to manipulate you in a certain way. It keeps coming up at a point when I'm getting sucked into the story itself, and don't want to think about the style.
What did you think?
