“If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller” Italo Calvino (1979) Review | Paradise and hell for booklovers

★★★★★ What a book. It is beyond whatever you expected, it’s an experience, an experiment, it’s both the paradise and the hell for lovers of a humble act of “reading a book”

🔽 log 🔽
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller 
Italo Calvino, 1979
Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore
Italy
272 pages
Read in 2025.10


🔽 Book review and notes 🔽

What a book.
It is beyond whatever you expected, it's an experience, an experiment, it's both the paradise and the hell for a reader.

So the protagonist "you" start reading a book, but it abruptly ends because of an error, so you return to the shop for a new copy, but it's actually another book, which also abruptly ends, and this goes on.
Each time "you" want to continue the last book because it's so good but things go bonkers, and each time you want to share this experience with a girl, "Another Reader" you met at the start.
Is it just a vicious circle? A perfect read? 
When will it end, and what is an end, anyway?

It might put you off at the start because you get completely lost, and because the book stops exactly when you start to understand the setting of the book.
But hang in there.

What is a book.
What is a story, what is the role of an author, of a translator, and a reader, other readers, in this humble experience of reading a book? 
How are we connected, beyond everyday life and common sense, beyond time and space in this humble experience of reading a book?
It throws a lot of questions at you, but what this book gives you as its answer is the joy.
And in the end, you cannot help but smile.

🔽 Where to buy / Summary and more info 🔽

●●● Amazon.com (US) ●●●

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

●●● Amazon.co.uk (UK) ●●●
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Classics)

●●● Amazon.it (Italy) ●●●
Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (Italiano)