Monday, November 8, 2010

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

Winter's Night is a meta-fictional book consisting of 'unfinished' stories written in the second person. To summarize the plot is difficult and really doesn't tell much, but essentially it’s about a character called the reader (the narrator addresses him as "you”) and his search for the endings of many different first chapters of books that we get a peek at. These unfinished stories are good. They don't feel incomplete or anything, they capture and maintain your interest and connect to the larger themes of the book. They also include characters similar to the ones in the main story which is great and really gives the whole thing a sense of thematic coherence. By the time we reach the midpoint the main story is about a counterfeiting conspiracy and the whole thing becomes a little confusing. This part of the book seemed tonally disconnected from the rest of the book, and it felt much more conventional as compared to the rest of the book. Then we get back to a library and the ending picks up in a hilariously abrupt way.

The style of writing in second person is very difficult, innovative and interesting, but by the end I felt that the second person narrative technique in general, is a little useless. Although I really enjoyed reading ‘Hema and Kaushik’, a short story in Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, which consists of three parts in which the first two parts are in second person written by two different people – in the first part, Hema is the narrator and she refers to Kaushik as ‘you’ and it’s vice versa in the second part, so it seemed more like reading their diary, and I didn’t feel too directly involved. Here's why I think the style did not work for this book: the second person narration purpose is twofold- to help you identify with the main character (how can you not, its 'you' after all) and also to keep the book from being confusing when narration shifts seamlessly from one story to another. When I saw that Calvino was using it for the first purpose, I felt like this was just a slight of hand trick devised to distract me as a reader and throw me off guard, so the effect was quite the opposite. It put me on my guard and I started seeing the "you" as a separate character. The effect was that it actually divorced me from the character of the reader. Was this the effect Calvino was shooting for? Hard to say, but I would guess no. And he backs up from the second purpose by digressing from the reader's story for most of the second half before he realizes what he's doing and sticks him back in but its disjointed and doesn't quite fit with how well he handled it at the beginning and the very last part of the book.

Another thing which needs to be mentioned is that I feel this book is meant for a male reader because Calvino uses second person narrative and YOU – the reader is assumed to be a male. There would be an almost instant alienation, for a female reader, and she wouldn’t be able to relate to the book. Also, the character of the female reader is in fact, not a reader but something to be read, an inscrutable enigma. It reminded me of Stephen Dedalus’s fascination with the Eileen character (and the two others, of course), and was not particularly interesting or fun.

There are a lot of duplications in this book. There are two authors, both of whom I take to represent Calvino, two female readers (other readers) who I think represent the ideal reader and the desiccating academic school of criticism, and two YOUs, the one actually reading the book and the "you" that acts in the book and is actually just a character you identify with, and sometimes a stand-in for the real you. Then there are all the short stories featuring facsimiles of these characters. I'm not quite clear on the point of these duplications. Maybe Calvino is making a point about how art duplicates things from other sources while making variations? There is definitely some tension between these duplications, as though Calvino challenges us to choose where between them we place ourselves on the continuum.

To sum it up, I did enjoy the book in parts, and felt that it was very interesting and different. It's not like anything I've read before.

Anirudh Mendiratta
2007PH10596

5 comments:

  1. I didn’t enjoy it. There. Its out in the open. You gasp. Aloud. You are horrified at the audacity of my statement. You are angry. You think its sacrilegious. And judging by the rest of the authors of this blog, You cannot believe that an engineering student would not like a modernist or a post modernist book.

    What is it with the authors of this blog? In case you’ve stumbled across this web page, know that we are a bunch of engineering undergrads in India, who have to each post a book report on this blog as part of a course on Modern Fiction. We all have to do 4 courses in Humanities and the Social Sciences in our time here. And in case you read any of the other posts, you’ll notice that there is not a single guy who didn’t like a book.

    Engineering students… Most of us spent our youth poring over graphs, figures and equations. Those of us who read a book in school (and believe me, a lot of us didn’t), hardly any of us went beyond Sidney Sheldon. I believe you can divide the reader spectrum of my age group into broadly 4 groups. Up till Enid Blytons, Hardy Boys, Animorphs ; till all those mystery/thrillers like Sheldon, Dan Brown ; till those popular books that your high school teacher might recommend to you or you see it on the reading list of your favourite celebrity (Animal Farm/ Eat Pray Love); till the classics (the pre-modernist/modernist/post-modernist shit). And I’m supposed to believe that people who hardly went beyond the mystery/thriller part of the spectrum are supposed to enjoy all the books that you can see in the panel on the right? Connoisseurs of Tom Clancy and Rowling now dig Kafka and Virginia Woolf?

    Or maybe we poor engineering students are so starved for cultural stuff that we find ambiguity (anything between 0 and 1) fascinating. Maybe we are forced for the first time to question things that we took for granted. Maybe we are forced to consider opinions about stuff we never thought people would have opinions on. And maybe we find the ambiguity of it all… relieving. Maybe it is a wonderful escape from the rigour and inflexibility of our theories and equations.

    Naaaaah! I bet half of us very grumbling while reading the book we were assigned. And then complained to our friends about this literature course that we got stuck with. And when it came to writing the book report, it was hard to go beyond “Its kinda nice, you know…” You hated every minute you spent reading this book too, didn’t you Anirudh?

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  2. I actually really liked the first chapter of the book. It talks about how You walk into the store and ultimately choose to read the latest book by Italo Calvino, and he writes pretty well. He is insightful and witty and I got all warmed up to read a nice interesting book.

    But he doesn’t really stop with the second person narrative there. It goes on and off and on and off. The off is those chapters where he starts with random little excerpts from other books only to turn back on the second person in the next chapter. His insights on the nature of reading are very interesting, and there are times when you can’t help but admire how clever the book is.

    But that’s a problem. I didn’t get half of the stuff till I read some critic’s reviews, and that’s when I discovered that the stuff I did get was so inconsequential that it wasn’t even mentioned in those reviews. I don’t like being subjected to an experimental book. I don’t care about the statement he was trying to make. I need to get tired of the regular old non-linear narrative filled with symbolic references you can at least try to grasp before reading inventive Mr. Calvino. Or maybe he’s just too smart for me.

    The first few chapters I read with my eyes wide with wonder. But later they turned into slits of annoyance which persisted after they very dissatisfying ending. I really rushed through the book in the latter stages. But I think I’ll read it once more when I have a little less on my plate, and can devote more time to think about the nature of reading and the structure of novels.

    Apoorv Gupta
    2007ME20563

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  3. Apoorv, I agree with you that most of us would've definitely felt we got stuck with the wrong kind of book and are doing this only because it is a requirement. When I started writing about English, August, I was myself at a loss of words as to what should I convey to someone who hasn't read it. Since we are not habitual reviewers, it becomes like a necessity to look out for some reviews on net before beginning with the writing part. And again, I concur that the observations that a bunch of engineering graduates will make on a book like Winter's night, will be much different and even trivial when compared to that of a literature student.
    Frankly,I myself didn't like English, August very much,as a whole,although I've mentioned it to be entertaining in parts.But when I sat down to write this blog, I simply wrote the first thoughts that came to my mind, without worrying about whether it was significant or not. And once I was finished, I realised that though it cannot be qualified as an authentic book review, but it was a perspective offered by one of the many readers of the book, and the future readers can only have a glimpse of what the book can offer from my review. I guess whoever has followed this approach, like you have too, has indeed done justice, in their own small way to the book, as well as to the course.

    Meenakshi
    2007CH10073

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  4. Apoorv, since you have brought an interesting point in the seemingly else mundane blog, where reviewers and commentators shirk in writing before deadline (and even after it) and when they do, it is full of appreciation for the novel, I would love to add my comment out there.

    To start with, technical stuff is not that boring, it just needs more percentage of the brain to function at a given time, which becomes very tiring. I would beg to differ with you on the point, we people have had a different past from the ones who didn't clear JEE. People from this college spend as much time on Facebook and other irrelevant stuff. Although it doesn't mean they were reading Kafka, neither were the others (I mean other college students), so what's the issue? And I don't understand the point in criticizing someone who does spend a lot of their time analyzing graphs and equations.

    Else, there are many points I would agree with you- essentially that many seem to have given positive reviews with the belief liking the novel, and praising its magnificence means more marks. I grumbled a lot about the course, which demands so much more- as I said "almost as much as a MAL course".

    Now, in my personal case I reviewed 2 novels- 1984 and Animal Farm, almost without online aid and felt it was worth the time, writing the review since it gives us an ability to analyze something without divulging much about it. It helps us understand the novel better. Both of these being extremely intellectual novels deserve being thought on, in many perspectives and I found this review an ideal way to accomplish the same. I also wrote 3 comments (apart from this)- Kite Runner, White Tiger and Never Let Me Go. Really, thinking about a novel from another perspective than "knowing the story" opens up the mind. And it's not that only literature students can do that. This is definitely something everyone can do very easily- needs no talents (although maybe a lit student can't do tech). Being an avid writer, I am glad to have got an opportunity to write reviews on some of my favorite novels, and this blog was not that much a burden as the thought of it initially seemed.

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  5. Ok, so I don’t hesitate in saying that it is definitely a book the like of something I’ve never read before. But also, a book which you’ll appreciate more only when you’ve read it at least twice. It takes time to get into the different layers that Calvino has tried to weave, sometimes even requiring you to twist your logic a bit.
    First of all, the attempt to write it in second person, itself makes you a part of the narrative, so that you are on your toes right from the beginning. It’s almost like you’ve started reading a new book, and just as you start getting involved in the story, somebody snaps you out of it, and puts you in another story, with a totally different setting. No matter how frustrated I got, its pull was strong enough for me to keep reading, if only to know what happens in the end.
    For someone who truly loves to read, this book should make you think over questions like-what do you expect from a story while reading it? Do you like to only skim through the book, or read it slowly so as to be able to read between the lines as well? It made me think so. Just like it did while I was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. The language is a bit funny and quirky. To conclude, I would say this book is worth giving a try (at least), to get an altogether unique reading experience. We often ask what is the ‘point’ of all these short fragmented stories, but that’s what the author wants us to understand, that what does a story become like if you remove this ‘point’ from it, if you remove the ‘meaning’ in the plot. This is what makes it different.

    Meenakshi
    2007ch10073

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