Italo Calvino

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Introduction by Peter Washington; Translation by William Weaver Italo Calvino's masterpiece combines a love story and a detective story into an exhilarating allegory of reading, in which the reader of the book becomes the book's central character. Based on a witty analogy between the reader's desire to finish the story and the lover's desire to consummate his or her passion, IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER is the tale of two bemused readers whose attempts to reach the end of the same book--IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER, by Italo Calvino, of course--are constantly and comically frustrated. In between chasing missing chapters of the book, the hapless readers tangle with an international conspiracy, a rogue translator, an elusive novelist, a disintegrating publishing house, and several oppressive governments. The result is a literary labyrinth of storylines that interrupt one another--an Arabian Nights of the postmodern age.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Alishba Ali

Veronica Palmieri

Esmée Mangoensoewito

You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything.

I realize that for a long time I have tended to reduce the presence of darkness in my life. The doctors' prohibition of going out after sunset has confined me for months within the boundaries of the daytime world. But this is not all: the fact is that I find in the day's light, in this diffused, pale, almost shadowless luminosity, a darkness deeper than the night’s.

“i am looking for Mr. Kauderer,” I said to him. He answered, “Mr. Kauderer is not here. But since the cemetery is the home of those who are not here, come in.”

With the revolution, there are people who change so much they become inrecognizable, and other people who feel they are the same selves as before. It must be a sign that they were prepared in advance for the new times.

Novel Ideas

Long novels today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years. 

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