If On a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino | This is not a Book Review

I decided to re-read this book before i read Calvino's Invisible Cities. The first time i read this was during my degree course. I remember liking the book. By the time of second reading, i'd forgotten almost all of it except the sort of climax where we get to read a novel that's made of the titles of the novels so far. This time the book simply failed to do anything to me.

This copy is calico's.

Not only did not find the style too made-up for my taste, the narrative itself sounded so out of context and silly. Therefore there aren't many excerpts and the ones i quote only mildly impressed me. This novel is often cited as an example for the technique of self-reflection in writing. I must say that this is a very poor example in that sense. The self-reflexive part is too contrived. There is nothing about this book that is not about this simple technique.

From [1]

You cast another bewildered look around you (or, rather: it was the books that looked at you, with the bewildered gaze of dogs who, from their cages in the city pound, see a former companion go off on the leash of his master, come to rescue him), and out you went.

From If on a winter's night a traveler

I have landed in this station tonight for the first time in my life, entering and leaving this bar, moving from the odor of the platform to the odor of wet sawdust in the toilets, all mixed in a single odor which is that of waiting, the odor of telephone booths when all you can do is reclaim your tokens because the number called has shown no signs of life. 

The following line because it ruffled the nostalgia of those phones from another life with just its sound.

I hang up the receiver, I await the rattling flush, down through the metallic throat, I push the glass door again,...

A better way of personifying Time.

You, reader, believed that there, on the platform, my gaze was glued to the hands of the round clock of an old station, hands pierced like halberds, in the vain attempt to turn them back, to move backward over the cemetery of spent hours, lying lifeless in their circular pantheon.

This for casting purposes. Filmmakers always seek such faces so... I do however wonder if the author would say the same about a man's face - 'water under the bridge' 'over and done with' etc.

They have known her since she was a girl, they know everything there is to know about her, some of them may have been involved with her, now water under the bridge, over and done with; in other words, there is a veil of other images that settles on her image and blurs it, a weight of memories that keep me from seeing her as a person seen for the first time, other people's memories suspended like the smoke under the lamps.

From [2] because i can relate.

The thing that most exasperates you is to find yourself at the mercy of the fortuitous, the aleatory, the random, in things and in human actions - carelessness, approximation, imprecision, whether your own or others'. In such instances your dominant passion is the impatience to erase the disturbing effects of that arbitrariness or distraction, to re-establish the normal course of events. 

Whichever house i stay in, the first thing i change over there is the toothpaste. It just cannot be pressed wherever. It has to be flattened upwards. Oh this is just one of the things.
During this read i kept thinking of that book - Ludmilla's Broken English by DBC Pierre because there is a Ludmilla in this one. That's the book i have been trying to read for more than five years now beaten only by Lolita.

From Leaning from the steep slope

The corrugated-iron roof resounded like a drum beneath the downpour...

This is a familiar sound for most people in Kerala, i guess. And the memory of the sound does things to me. Like putting me in an imaginary school in Kerala. Me among many other students in a classroom with this sound unable to go home due to the rains.  

From Chapter [5] i got a nice image

...Last night I had a dream, I was in my village, in the chicken coop of our house, I was looking, looking for something in the chicken coop, in the basket where the hens lay their eggs, and what did I find? A book, one of the books I read when I was a boy, a cheap edition, the pages tattered, the black-and-white engravings all coloured by me, with crayons... You know? As a boy, in order to read, I would hide in the chicken coop..." 

Liked this scene from Looks down in the gathering shadow is a scene where an assassination is done while the woman is having sex with the man who is going to get killed. I don't like such cliches but it has been written in a nice way so the picture stays.

...Meanwhile with one hand she was holding the dead man and with the other she was unbuttoning me, all three of us crammed into that tiny car, in a public parking lot of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Wriggling her legs in contortions-harmonious ones, I must say-she sat astride my knees and almost smothered me in her bosom as in a landslide. Jojo meanwhile was falling on top of us, but she was careful to push him aside, her face only inches from the face of the dead man, who looked at her with the whites of his widened eyes. As for me, caught by surprise like this, with my physical reactions following their own course, obviously preferring to obey her than to follow my own terrified spirit, without even having to move, since she thought of everything-well, I realized then that what we were doing was a ceremony to which she attached a special meaning, there before the dead man's eyes, and I felt the soft, very tenacious grip closing and couldn't escape her.

Chapter [6] mentions a phenomenon that i like a lot.

Would you like to be in his place, to establish that exclusive bond, that communion of inner rhythm, that is achieved through a book's being read at the same time by two people, as you thought possible with Ludmilla? 

I have many books and people with whom i want to do this. So far it has happened only with The God of Small Things for me.

I feel the jealousy of my books, which would like to be read the way she reads

I, as a reader am supremely jealous of fellow readers who can read the way they do, remember the way they do, understand a book the way they do. I consider myself a very bad reader.

I completely disagree with the following statement by the writer comparing reading and sex.

What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.

What he says about reading is true but i honestly can't think of anything other than the holes in human body that open during sex. It's possible to be in the time and space opened by a book while having sex though. For that the sex will have to be bad, i guess.

From On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon

...As for Makiko, she always displayed the gay and carefree air with which certain children who grow up amid bitter family dissension defend themselves against their surroundings, and she had borne it within her, growing up...

This chapter has one of the worst fantasies. One involving the nipples of a mother and daughter grazing a man at the same time. Sexual jealousy between the mother and daughter and other such silly fantasies of men.

In Chapter [9] i liked the bit about airplanes.

To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and the when on which you vanished. Meanwhile, what do you do? How do you occupy this absence of yourself from the world and of the world from you? You read; you do not raise your eyes from the book between one airport and the other, because beyond the page there is the void, the anonymity of stopovers, of the metallic uterus that contains you and nourishes you, of the passing crowd always different and always the same. 

From chapter [10] i got this scene.

The train has stopped amid tracks and signal poles, perhaps at a switch point outside some remote station. There is fog and snow, nothing can be seen. On the next track another train has stopped, headed in the opposite direction, all its windows frosted. At the window opposite yours, the circular movement of a gloved hand restores to the pane some of its transparency: a woman's form emerges, in a cloud of furs. "Ludmilla..." you call her. "Ludmilla, the book..." you try to tell her, more with gestures than with your voice, "the book you're looking for...I've found it here..." And you struggle to lower the window to pass it to her through the hard fringe of the ice that covers the train in a thick crust. 

Usage

'...soon, a chasm will yawn between me and Franziska, an abyss!'

In one of the final pages is a note by me saying 'the auto driver asked me how much a ticket to Kozhikode costs'. I have a vague memory of this happening in Ernakulam station. I have come to realise that i make notes of things that i don't want to forget but because i wrote them down, i also tell my mind to make space by forgetting those. What a Catch-22. [Damn! That's another book i want to re-read.]