-Apologies for missing a day Constant Readers, I had a brief fight with food poisoning!-
My senior quote in High School was "All I want of life is postmodern literature and single malt scotch". This still holds true today, and no one I've read has been more a master of that genre of literature than Italy's own Italo Calvino. Italo Calvino was born in Cuba to botanist parents. His mother gave him the unusual first name "Italo" to remind me of his Italian heritage, but since they moved back to Italy in Liguria before he turned two, Calvino found the name "belligerently nationalist". Calvino went to college reluctantly for agriculture like his family despite his urge to be a writer. In 1943 at the age of twenty, Calvino witnessed the German occupation of Liguria and the establishment of Mussolini's Italian Social Republic. Refusing military service, Calvino went into hiding. After reading on a wide array of subjects, Calvino came to the conclusion that of all the partisan groups, the communists were "the most convincing political line". He later joined the Italian Resistance in the spring of 1944, and because of his refusal to be a conscript, his parents were held hostage by the Nazis. Seeing the horrors of the war only deepened his loyalty to the communist cause, and officially joined the Italian Communist Party after moving to Turin after the war.
It was in Turin that Calvino's first works were published by Ello Vittorini in Il Politecnico, a University Magazine. After graduating with a Master's Thesis on Joseph Conrad (who's Heart of Darkness we will cover soon) in 1947, he began work an the Einaudi Publishing House and later as a journalist for L'Unita, the official communist rag. Finally publishing his first book The Path to the Nest of Spiders in 1947 he won Premio Riccione and sold 5000 copies, a huge achievement for post-war Italy. Calvino would continue to publish realist fiction until 1957, where he became disillusioned to communism due to the Soviet invasion of Hungary the previous year. Citing the violent suppression of the Hungarians and Joseph Stalin's revealed crimes, Calvino resigned from the Communist Party. Calvino would begin to write more and more outlandish works, and in 1968 he relocated his family to Paris where he became good friends and a contemporary to the Oulipo, whose numbers included Roland Bathes and Georges Perec. To go fully into Calvino's numerous awards, achievements, contacts, and honors, would be the length of a novel in and of itself. Notable among his awards was the French Legion d'honneur in 1981. Four years later, Calvino would die of a brain hemorrhage in a hospital in Siena.
Aside from its contents, If on a winter's night a traveler (and yes it is spelled as such for a reason) is not only astounding in its postmodern concept and prose, but also the fact that it was published in 1979, when Calvino was NINETY-THREE. If that doesn't tell you the kind of artist that Calvino was I'm not sure what else I could say to convince you. If on a winter's night a traveler centers on you reading If on a winter's night a traveler. Seriously. It opens with a description of you getting comfortable in your chair, getting the lights right, and sitting down with the very book you're reading, and it describes you reading this novel and your thoughts and bewilderment. There's one catch though. As you end the first chapter of If on a winter's night a traveler, you discover that another book has been stitched into it! How will you ever find out the ending? What could have been the cause? So you go back to the bookstore you bought it from, angry and upset, and you find out that there are no more copies of If on a winter's night a traveler. So you settle for the next best thing, the book that got stitched together with your copy; outside the town of Malbork. (and yes the spelling is important).
You bring outside the town of Malbork home and begin to read only for the same fate to befall you. Exacerbated, you go to the publisher directly. You can imagine how this goes. You get yet another book within a book that is interrupted by yet another book. This turtles all the way down nonsense has you really pissed, but there's another reader, a woman named Lumilla who is noticing the same problem you are. Together the two of you set off to discover the conspiracy of why all these books are being mismatched and ruined all for the quest of finishing If on a winter's night, a traveler. As you draw closer and closer and get dropped into story after story, Calvino seems to also dance a tango with your imagination. He takes you to erotic war stories, apathetic and dry westerns, philosophical waxing translations of Asian novels, and more. Each novel you read affecting the story at large in both prose and style.
As you near the end of the novel, the intentional book fraud is revealed, and you finally get your actual real copy of If on a winter's night a traveler. It ends as you would expect, the book describes you in bed with Lumilla, now happily married, finishing If on a winter's night a traveler. This book is a masterpiece for its post modern stance on the relationship between the author, reader, and all the middle men between such as translators and publishing houses. In the same vein that all these aspects are cogs in the experience of a book, so too are all the titles that you've been forced to slog through in your quest for the truth. As it turns out, they all form one, coherent sentence;
"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?"
Which when you think about it, is a great first sentence for another book. Truly genius.
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