This month features If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino, Vintage, 0099430894, £6.99 |
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When I was studying Creative Writing with Malcolm Bradbury at the University of East Anglia in 1995, there were two writers whose names came up in class far more frequently than those of any others: Raymond Carver and Italo Calvino.
They were taken as opposites, almost: Carver, a minimalist, a 'dirty realist'; Calvino, a fantasist, a post-modernist.
In the end, they came to stand - among the writers in class - for two opposite tendencies in all fiction: 'WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW' and 'MAKE IT ALL UP'.
Both, of course, were grossly distorted by this. Carver's literary self-consciousness was ignored, Calvino's alternative realism went unmentioned.
Also, their common ancestry was overlooked; neither Carver's back-to-the-bone prose nor Calvino's parodic cliff-hangers (of which more in a moment) could have existed without popular fictional models - and in particular, the American hardboiled writers of the 1920s and 30s: Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller consists, as an informed glance at the contents page reveals, of the opening chapters of ten different novels; their titles make a paragraph, perhaps a poem, and a question. Interleaved with these, and doubling up at the end, are Chapters One to Twelve - all of which concern you.
The novel's opening paragraph, often printed on the front cover of the book, is famous: 'You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought.'
But you are not going to find this an easy, uninterrupted read - for just when you're dangling over the cliff-edge, it stops; and in order to continue reading, you start off on a wild book chase.
What was a Cold War thriller becomes a Cimmerian (don't ask) coming-of-age tale, a European meditation (curiously like W.G.Sebald in tone), a nineteenth century love triangle, a Parisian murderer's confession, a campus suspense novel... etcetera, etcetera.
(Whether or not you find these constant interruptions a horrible torture or a delicious tease, I have no way of predicting.)
The novel is full of little manifestos for what it is, or what it might possibly become:
'The novel I would most like to read at this moment,' Ludmilla explains, 'should have as its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life upon you, simply allowing you to observe its growth, like a tree, an entangling, as of branches and leaves...'
Ludmilla is the other main character - the Other Reader - in the story within, or between, the stories: you are in pursuit of her - although this element of cherchez la femme, which also appears in the majority of the opening chapters, is modified halfway through the book: 'you' can be female, too, the narrator insists. (I don't think you - female or male - will believe him; you'll see that this, to put it at its mildest, is a male-directed novel which follows male desires.)
'The pursuit of the interrupted book, which instilled in you a special excitement since you were conducting it together with the Other Reader, turns out to be the same thing as pursuing her, who eludes you in a proliferation of mysteries, deceits, disguises...'
(Oh, Italo, those mysterious, deceitful women!)
The prose styles Calvino uses throughout If on a Winter's Night... are incredibly diverse and daring; now, frustratingly slow, almost ambient, now racing towards another soon-to-be-thwarted climax. Two chapters, Leaning from the steep slope and On a carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon, are stand-alone masterpieces.
At the heart of it all, strangely and entirely appropriately, is Snoopy:
'On the wall facing my desk hangs a poster somebody gave me. The dog Snoopy is sitting at a typewriter, and in the cartoon you read the sentence, "It was a dark and stormy night..." Every time I sit down here I read, "It was a dark and story night..." and the impersonality of that incipit seems to open the passage from one world to the other, from the time and space of here and now to the time and space of the written word; I feel the thrill of a beginning that can be followed by multiple developments, inexhaustibly; I am convinced there is nothing better than a conventional opening, and attack from which you can expect everything and nothing; and I realize also that this mythomane dog will never succeed in adding to the first seven words another seven or another twelve without breaking the spell. The facility of the entrance into another world is an illusion: you start writing in a rush, anticipating the happiness of a future ending, and the void yawns on the white page.'
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