The first part of the book leads the reader to believe that the issue at stake is to solve the problem of finding the end of the stories we have started reading. But half way into the book we realize that with so many stories unfinished, it would take more than one book to develop a reasonable ending to all of them together or separate.
The second part of “If on a winter’s night a traveler,” the true story takes shape. This is the story of an ordinary reader who gets sucked into a fictitious conspiracy theory about writing and reading. He finds himself solving the mystery surrounding the counterfeiting acts of a malicious translator who besides forging the works of renowned authors also doesn’t finish the works.
At some point I was able to see that the story was about the character of the male reader and the adventures he underwent of the malfunctioning of his readings. Each unfinished story was just a step in the direction of his journey to find out about the translator and his acts, his motives and his inability to counterfeit or deceive the reader.
I couldn’t help recalling the character from Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor who finds himself uncovering the mysteries and conspiracies of the Illuminati. Here, the conspiracy is not so much about knowledge and power but very much about what is considered one source of knowledge and power: reading and writing. If the source is counterfeited what is left? Everything turns a counterfeited chaos. The whole chapter 9 illustrates this state of chaos.
Despite recognizing the new direction the story was taking, I felt through the book, the nagging need to know what would finally happen with those unfinished stories. Even though I had said in my previous posting that it didn’t matter whether a story has an end or not, and although the book questions it too “‘Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end?’” (259) Why did the author choose to tell the story in a way that didn’t allow me to let go of those unfinished stories?
It was about an awakening of the reader, a shake to our abandonment to a passive role as readers.
“You might as well stick to this other abstraction of travel, accomplished by the anonymous uniformity of typographical characters…You realize that it takes considerable heedlessness to entrust yourself to unsure instruments, handled with approximation; or perhaps this demonstrates an invisible tendency to passivity, to regression, to infantile dependence. (but are you reflecting on the air journey or on reading?)” (210)
This role of the reader and the importance given to the “ideal reader” (189), emphasize that the reader validates or disfranchises the author/writer.
Seferina