Reader as main character

Press, 27 November 1982, Page 16

Reader as main character

If ori a Winter’s Night a Traveller. By Italo Calvino. Picador, 1982. 204 pp. $7.95 (paperback).

(Reviewed by

Mhairi Erber)

Italo Calvino is. I suspect, something of an author's author. “If on a Winter's Night a Traveller” has already received widespread critical acclaim, as have Calvino’s other novels, none of which I have read, but which I intend to sample at least,, so intrigued have I been by the present novel. I hope they arc not quite such heavy going. "Traveller'’ is a very clever book and. in patches, it is extremely readable, interesting and entertaining. The subject matter is, however, of somewhat limited and academic appeal. Furthermore, there has been a quite deliberate attempt to create a feeling of frustration and confusion, the success of which can have demoralising consequences for the reader. The book is about the -problems and frustrations of reading, writing and producing a novel. This is. a topic which might once have been dealt with in an essay and which does'not lend itself very naturally to the narrative form. Calvino has circumvented the problem by making the reader the protagonist of the story and around the reader he creates a love story and a work of crime detection. About half of “Traveller” consists of the beginnings of novels which the reader, for one reason or another, cannot continue.

Few of these were of any intrinsic interest. Furthermore, while acknowledging that much of what the author has to say, particularly on creativity and particular schools of. literary criticism and literary analysis, were of the greatest interest and often very funny, the novel is ultimately superficial: It did not seem to have a great’ deal of relevance to . what Calvino himself says is the ultimate meaning of all stories-“the -continuity of life, the inevitability of death."