Well I’ve finally finished this book, and frankly it is difficult to sort out what best to say on the subject. I will attempt to organize my thoughts on the following assumption, as in analyzing this kind of book we must make certain assumptions that others may or may not also have: I believe the book attempts to achieve the ultimate kind of metanarration, one in which meaning is wholly ambiguous, and interpretation is left entirely up to the reader.
This may seem like a somewhat vague and shallow analysis, so allow me to clarify: the book is a joke, and it makes me laugh. It seems to me that the story is an extended satire, poking fun at books, poking fun at both readers and writers, deliberately playing on tropes and complexities and insights, the ideas of structure and form, throwing in themes that mean multiple things at once, and recursions that continue on forever, in counters to counters to counters that purposely throw the reader this way and that.
I interpret the final library scene as being sort of wistful, with readers attempting to hearken back, through the murkiness of thought and memory and description, to their original state of reading, what initially drove them to read, and what ultimately was irreversibly changed by that simple act of reading.
This book will make some readers angry, and it will leave most everyone confused (or pretending not to be). Some readers will try to analyze it to death in the hopes of finding a singular cogent meaning, which they probably will find, as the book provides a multitude of meanings, including this interpretation here, which may or may not have been intended – I suppose we’ll never know, as Calvino is Italian and also dead.
What remains is this book that plays on the idea of books, and of reading and writing, and of the conventions applied to all of them, the malleability of stories, and the arbitrariness of plot construction. Note the general meaningless of the many endings proposed for Flannery’s story of the two writers – it does not seem to matter how the story ends.
David,
I like your bold analysis. I see what you mean about the book being a sort of joke, satire, and trope, in the way that it plays with the novelty of reading and writing. As far as what Calvino expects us to take away from his novel–it is true that we will “never know” since Calvino isn’t here to tell us. However, my own two cents is that Calvino’s goal is to make us think about what it means to read, what it means to write, and the relationship between these two acts. Calvino’s novel is attempting to demonstrate the arbitrary qualities of stories and books, narration and novels, authorship and readership, and everything else we’ve been discussing. So all in all, I think we are taking away what Calvino wants us to take away. I don’t think there is one concrete answer to all of the questions that the novel brings up, but Calvino’s purpose isn’t to present answers. It’s to present questions. I think that is what made this novel so enjoyable–it brought up questions that we’ve all probably thought about, but never fully articulated, but since it wasn’t able to answer them it left all of us (or at least you and I) frustrated at times.