Italo Calvino, 1979
translation: William Weaver, 1981
the fifty-seventh book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by Caleb Heddle
This was not my first crack at this book; during my sophomore year of college, my roommate recommended it to me and so I duly went down to Cody’s, bought a copy, and started in. I didn’t get very far before I bogged down and gave up. This time I did not give up! But I did bog down in roughly the same place. I just struggled through it instead of moving on to a different book. What a slog.
If on a winter’s night a traveler, famously, is about as meta as it gets. The first sentence is “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.” What follows are instructions on how to create the best reading environment and a discussion of how you came to buy this book, passing up others in the bookstore (e.g., “the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered,” etc.) Eventually the “you” character starts in:
If on a winter’s night a traveler
The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph.
So even the novel-within-a-novel is meta. That novel goes on for several pages, but then the reader discovers that his copy of the book is defective: not only does the same bundle of pages repeat, but when he goes back to the shop to get a new copy, the proprietor tells him that what he has read isn’t the story-world version of If on a winter’s night a traveler at all, but instead a Polish novel called Outside the town of Malbork. So the reader gets a proper copy of the Malbork book and starts in on that, but it turns out that it too is defective, and that what he has started to read is yet a third book. I mean, there’s really no point in my explaining the premise, since this book is meta enough that there’s an author within the story who lays it out:
I have had the idea of writing a novel composed only of beginnings of novels. The protagonist could be a Reader who is continually interrupted. The Reader buys the new novel A by the author Z. But it is a defective copy, he can’t go beyond the beginning… He returns to the bookshop to have the volume exchanged…
In his quest to read at least one of these books he has started, the “you” figure has various meta adventures, such as when he winds up in a study group which proves to be a pretty spot-on satire of every class I took back in grad school:
You are impatient, you and Ludmilla, to see this lost book rise from its ashes, but you must wait until the girls and the young men of the study group have been handed out their assignments: during the reading there must be some who underline the reflections of production methods, others the processes of reification, others the sublimation of repression, others the sexual semantic codes, others the metalanguages of the body, others the transgression of roles, in politics and in private life.
Anyway, the main problem I had with this book is that not only does the meta stuff quickly grow tiresome, but it is what Scott McCloud would call a Step Two work:
The problem with Step Two works is that the ideas rarely do arrive in time to give the form substance. If you’re going to write a book about a reader who is captivated by the beginnings of ten different novels, that means you have to write ten different captivating beginnings of novels—and none of these ten is anything I would choose to read of my own accord. Let me put it this way. The title If on a winter’s night a traveler does not follow anglophone capitalization conventions for book titles. We do not bow to continental European convention in rendering other translated titles: Calvino’s previous novel, Le città invisibili, came to the English-speaking world as Invisible Cities, not as Invisible cities. Why make an exception for this one? Because one of the many gimmicks of this book is that the titles of the ten novels-within-a-novel all add up to a sentence that is mistaken for the beginning of an eleventh:
If on a winter’s night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on a carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave—What story down there awaits its end?—he asks, anxious to hear the story.
That may very well be the worst sentence I have ever read in a novel. It out-Bulwer-Lyttons Bulwer-Lytton by a mile. So, sure, clever idea, but I got virtually nothing out of this book that I did not get out of having the idea of it explained to me.
G. K. Chesterton, 1908
I needed something to listen to on one of my drives back from Portland, and poking around archive.org for public domain audiobooks, I happened across this and experienced a flash of recognition: back in my days writing SAT manuals, the opening of this book was a passage in one of the homework sections! I’d always meant to read it sometime! Apparently, after nearly twenty years, “sometime” had finally arrived.
G. K. Chesterton came to be dubbed “the prince of paradox”, and this book offers many vivid examples of why. It’s the story of a policeman attempting to infiltrate a secret society of anarchists, which proves to have passwords and governing boards and democratic votes—as the protagonist puts it, “that law and organisation which is so essential to anarchy”. Even more than paradox, Chesterton seems to adore swapping actors and things acted upon; here’s an excerpt from that homework passage which captures the tic well:
That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face—that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white beard and the wild, white hat—that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others. That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself?
For the bulk of its running time, The Man Who Was Thursday is a satirical yarn of the sort Mark Twain used to spin; as noted, it’s about a policeman who goes undercover to infiltrate a secret society of anarchists, only to gradually discover that the cabal consists entirely of undercover policemen. Could’ve been an amusing short story. The problem is that not only does padding this idea out to novel length make this something of a shaggy dog story, but in the last couple of chapters, it swerves into heavy-handed Christian allegory. That’s even worse than going meta! Automatic thumbs-down.
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