Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler is, in my opinion, a very conventional love story complicated only by narration. This idea may at first seem absurd or even contradictory if one considers this novel to be a convoluted mesh of unrelated story after story paired with fragmented bits of a narrator’s prolific stream of quandaries and consciousness. I certainly viewed it as such for quite a few chapters, and I throughly despise this novel for what I would call its “tedious narration.” But whether or not I like or dislike this novel is irrelevant. What matters, I would think, is what we as readers can or can’t collectively draw from this novel. Did we all discern the same thing about “You” and “I” and Ludmilla? Why not? What disagreements might arise when one student decides there is one narrator and another decides there are multiple? How do we decide authority in this novel? Who gets to make that decision? Does it even matter that any of us understand or purport to understand what is “going on” in this novel? Is this simply a novel meant to be “different” so the author can feel like a special little snowflake? Maybe. Maybe not. I suspect those of you reading this can deliver a gradation of answers.
I found the following quotation to be resonant of my experience with this novel:
“To read properly you must take in both the murmuring effect and the effect of the hidden intention, which you (and I, too) are as yet in no position to perceive. In reading, therefore, you must remain both oblivious and highly alert” (Calvino, 18).”
I tried to make sense of what I was reading from the start, tried to pinpoint key characters and ground myself in something more “solid,” but that ended up being a futile effort until I encountered the character Ludmilla. The entire story felt like a murmuring of hidden messages that I could hardly keep track of, let alone attempt to deduce some greater meaning. Up to that point, I assumed the narrator’s “You” and “Reader” referred to me, that the narrator was trying to include me as a character in the story. But I am not a “young gentleman” interested in a girl named Ludmilla. It was at that point (see pages 29 and 45) that the “You” and “Reader” became gendered and I was comfortably able to disassociate myself with those titles. “You” became just another character in this novel, no different than Ludmilla. I might as well have given “You” a name. Perhaps William or Thaddeus or some other ridiculous trapping to distance him from me. The same can be said of the narrator, “I.” “I” could be Bob the narrator or Fred the narrator or something like that. The point I am trying to make is simply that these are still just characters in a novel. “You” is just a figure attracted to Ludmilla and trying to make sense of a series of unrelated books. The core of this novel (as far as a I have read, which is only to Chapter 6) seems to be a love story between a man and a woman. I hardly find that aspect of it to be unconventional. Perhaps that is just a simplification, but it is certainly how I have made sense of the novel so far.