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If on a Winter's Night a Traveller: Italo Calvino Paperback – 20 Feb. 1992

4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 1,139 ratings

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A masterwork by the incomparable, genre-defying, wondrous Italo Calvino.

You go into a bookshop and buy
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You like it. But there is a printer's error in your copy. You take it back to the shop and get a replacement. But the replacement seems to be a totally different story. You try to track down the original book you were reading but end up with a different narrative again. This remarkable novel leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary and a quest. But the real hero of them all is you, the reader.

'Breathtakingly inventive' David Mitchell

'A writer of dizzying ambition and variety, each of his stories is a fresh adventure into the possibilities of fiction'
Guardian

Kindle Storyteller Award 2024
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Review

Ingenious ― Mail on Sunday

Breathtakingly inventive

The greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century ―
Guardian

Reading Calvino, you're constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before.This is highly unnerving: fortunately you're usually too busy laughing to go mad... I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends

A devastating, wonderfully ingenious parody of all those dreary best-sellers you buy at the airport... It is a "world novel": take it with you next time you plan to travel in an armchair ―
Observer

From the Back Cover

You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You try to track down the original book you were reading but end up with a different narrative again. This remarkable novel leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary and a quest.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage Classics; 1st edition (20 Feb. 1992)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0099430894
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0099430896
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.8 x 1.6 x 19.6 cm
  • Customer reviews:
    4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 1,139 ratings

About the author

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Italo Calvino
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Italo Calvino (Italian: [ˈiːtalo kalˈviːno]; 15 October 1923 - 19 September 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).

Admired in Britain and the United States, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death, and a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by The original uploader was Varie11 at Italian Wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Customer reviews

4 out of 5 stars
1,139 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book enjoyable and compelling. They praise the writing quality as excellent, clear, and readable. However, some find the pacing frustrating, difficult to follow, and annoying. Opinions vary on the thought-provoking aspects, with some finding it intriguing and fascinating, while others feel it's too clever and irritating.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

44 customers mention ‘Enjoyment’31 positive13 negative

Customers find the book engaging and well-written. They describe it as an intelligent and enjoyable read suitable for all readers, including avid and occasional ones.

"...Each of the ten individual novels that we – that you – start to enjoy is compelling...." Read more

"...The book explores the involvement of the reader in the development of the meaning of a novel through the starting of various entirely different..." Read more

"...Worth the effort but strap yourself in - If On A Winter's Night you have the time ..." Read more

"...Many of the sentences are long and cumbersome, though that may be a result of a bad translation, and the chapters of the books the protagonist is..." Read more

17 customers mention ‘Writing quality’17 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's writing quality. They find it engaging, with a clear world and interesting plot twists. Readers appreciate the author's ability to create a vivid world quickly in each chapter. The book is described as an excellent literary work that examines the nature of writing and its fallacy. It has all the charm, invention, and readability you would expect from Italy. The meta aspect of Calvino's writing is also enjoyed. Overall, customers describe the book as a very different and thought-provoking read that makes you think.

"...An outstanding novel by one of Italy’s finest novelists. And the fact that it’s about novels works perfectly. Not a word to say against it." Read more

"...The concept is good, the writing sharp, but it becomes a little tiresome after a while as we lurch from one story to another without any resolution...." Read more

"...makes this book fascinating and so engaging, the fact that it is so different and so novel (pardon the pun) in it's conception...." Read more

"...Each extract has all the charm, invention and readability you would expect from Italy's finest - and the whole thing seems to come together as a..." Read more

4 customers mention ‘Book content’4 positive0 negative

Customers enjoy the book's content. They find it a complex encyclopedia of literature, with books within books and meta-book elements.

"Italy's best writer to never have received a Nobel price. A book for book-nerds. Great looking edition, the Vintage Classics...." Read more

"...The mother of all meta-lit. Calvino composes a complex encyclopedia of everything literature when he pulls the reader to tag along a mind boggling..." Read more

"Books within books, who doesn't love that!?! It's a compelling and beautifully written piece...." Read more

"A brilliantly unique and meta book..." Read more

3 customers mention ‘Classic content’3 positive0 negative

Customers enjoy the classic content. They describe it as a true original.

"Classic...." Read more

"A True Modern Classic...." Read more

"a true original..." Read more

36 customers mention ‘Thought provoking’23 positive13 negative

Customers have different views on the book. Some find it interesting and creative, with a fascinating story. Others feel the narrative is too clever and the plot is strange.

"...An outstanding novel by one of Italy’s finest novelists. And the fact that it’s about novels works perfectly. Not a word to say against it." Read more

"...This gives Calvino the opportunity to write clever pastiches of various familiar novel forms and patterns...." Read more

"Thoroughly enjoyed this unusual book." Read more

"...It could be the fault of the translator, but this is dreadful stuff. Like a 2nd year English student trying to be clever...." Read more

17 customers mention ‘Pacing’3 positive14 negative

Customers find the book's pacing frustrating, difficult to follow, and disappointing. They describe it as dull, pointless, and tedious. Readers mention that the book is unsatisfactory and hard work.

"Novels about novels, or novelists, tend to be turgid – a tedious exercise in navel-gazing, they are usually self-indulgent and unappealing...." Read more

"...The concept is good, the writing sharp, but it becomes a little tiresome after a while as we lurch from one story to another without any resolution...." Read more

"...Like a 2nd year English student trying to be clever. Irritating, smug and without any narrative merit...." Read more

"I'm still reading this, but not terribly actively...." Read more

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Top reviews from United Kingdom

  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 December 2014
    Novels about novels, or novelists, tend to be turgid – a tedious exercise in navel-gazing, they are usually self-indulgent and unappealing. That is emphatically not so for Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller.

    That’s because in Calvino’s book, what he explores is the act of communication between writer and reader – in which the reader has as essential a role to play. Indeed, the novel is that most unusual thing, a second-person narrative: you the reader play the leading role in it (though sadly that’s you, the male reader – perhaps, in his defence, catering for a reader of either gender would have been too difficult).

    You are trying to read a novel, specifically If on a winter’s night a traveller. But there’s been a terrible mistake in its printing: after you’ve read enough to gain a taste for it, you find it’s interrupted. And back at the bookshop, what you’re given as the continuation is, actually, quite another book. Which again is interrupted after the first chapter.

    And so it goes on. You go from publisher to critic to translator and, ultimately to the writer, constantly seeking the next part of each of the books you start, each of them interrupted, always at a tantalising point. In the course of this quest, in which you’re joined by a fascinating female reader and her sister, the first gentle and self-effacing though just as assertive as the other, who is forceful and hot-blooded, you take us all through a voyage of discovery of what it is to write, and read, a novel: the feeling, for instance, that it might be preferable only ever to start a book, because as the novelist advances, all the options opened by the beginning are closed off. That impoverishes you the reader (see? you’re always in the frame.)

    Each of the ten individual novels that we – that you – start to enjoy is compelling. All are mysteries of some kind: a subversive movement that has persuaded a narrator to an exchange of suitcases at a station, a femme fatale who may be seducing a narrator into assisting with her clandestine plans, a call to answer a ringing phone in a house that is not the narrator’s though the call is for him… All these tales promise interesting developments, though we the readers, or rather you the reader, soon learn to distrust such promises.

    Are all these narrators the same narrator? Perhaps but perhaps not. If there is one consistent thread running through all the narrations, that’s you, the reader.

    So the structure works. It’s a romp, often highly humorous, through the creative process, in which the writer is a character in his own novel, and the reader is as much so. At which point, the exploration isn’t simply the navel-gazing of the novelist describing novel-writing, but focuses on the relationship between the writer and the reader, creating a fictional space between them.

    When I add that the ending is a jewel, wrapping up the whole story neatly and, above all, with great wit, launchng yu back on the track of the unfinished narration, what could possibly hold you back? An outstanding novel by one of Italy’s finest novelists. And the fact that it’s about novels works perfectly.

    Not a word to say against it.
    31 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 April 2012
    I downloaded this novel onto my Kindle to read fot a literature class. We read it after Tristram Shandy to compare their "rambling" qualities. The book explores the involvement of the reader in the development of the meaning of a novel through the starting of various entirely different stories that somehow or other get curtailed very quickly. This gives Calvino the opportunity to write clever pastiches of various familiar novel forms and patterns. I felt that an earlier study of philosophy including Roland Barthes "Death of the Author" gave me some idea of what was going on, and being in a class helped my enjoyment of this book. There is material on the interenet (OK Wikipedia for example) that could be worth reading before plunging into this book.
    4 people found this helpful
    Report
  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 November 2024
    Thoroughly enjoyed this unusual book.
  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 January 2021
    What starts out as an apparently absorbing read turns into a marathon. The concept is good, the writing sharp, but it becomes a little tiresome after a while as we lurch from one story to another without any resolution. I guess the writer would say that was the point, and maybe that makes him too clever for me. Worth the effort but strap yourself in - If On A Winter's Night you have the time ...
    8 people found this helpful
    Report
  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 June 2013
    Italo Calvino is one of those writers who gently tugs you through the book like the soft smell of a delicious meal wafting through the house, or a gentle tug of a summer breeze that makes you anticipate summer even more. And I don't even like summer.

    The book is for all readers: avid readers; occasional readers; lazy readers; slow readers - whatever type of reader you are, it's for you. The thing I like the most about this novel is that it plays with the perceptions of books, of readers and of narrative (especially narrative). You are, throughout this novel, both the observer and the observed: you are the reading yourself as a character and as a reader. That's what makes this book fascinating and so engaging, the fact that it is so different and so novel (pardon the pun) in it's conception.

    It's a brilliant book and I would definitely recommend it to everyone.
    5 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 February 2013
    My wife asked me to read this, having got this book for her book club. She wanted a second opinion on it.

    It could be the fault of the translator, but this is dreadful stuff.
    Like a 2nd year English student trying to be clever. Irritating, smug and without any narrative merit.

    I don't think I've been as irritated at an author since I was once forced to read a Jeffrey Archer!

    Of course post-modernism can be a tough read at best, but there are far better works in Spanish that deal with eidesis and Platonism.
    In The Cave of Ideas by Somoza (in English known as The Athenian Murders) for example shows that you can write a the self-referential work that deals with the intersection of the novel and Plato's theory of ideals and at the same time engage the reader in the plot strong enough to win the Golden Dagger.

    By comparison this is someone playing at literature.
    11 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 December 2011
    if you get it, you'll love it; if you don't, you won't.
    Calvino is clever and famous for his short stories ('the distance of the moon' is a particular favourite of mine). From this it might be supposed that he gets bored with an idea very quickly and likes to move on. This book is essentially all the novels he started, but failed to finish, brought together very ingeniously to form a whole that is much more than the sum of its parts. Each extract has all the charm, invention and readability you would expect from Italy's finest - and the whole thing seems to come together as a coherent whole that gives comment on the relationship between author and reader and literature in general. It is, however, enjoyable at any level.
    6 people found this helpful
    Report

Top reviews from other countries

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  • Filipa
    5.0 out of 5 stars Book
    Reviewed in Germany on 25 September 2019
    As expected, well packed
  • Kindle Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Entrancing
    Reviewed in Australia on 10 March 2019
    Recalls the short fiction of Borges. Calvino hops effortlessly between genres as he explores the natures of literature and reading, and their relation to life. A novel consisting mainly of the beginnings of novels, and a postmodern classic.
  • NithinK
    5.0 out of 5 stars An unique experience of a book with masterful techniques & well thought out ideas.
    Reviewed in India on 9 September 2016
    Reading my first Calvino novel, few pages in I realized that this is no ordinary novel, Calvino breaks many a rules of storytelling by breaking every rules both written & unwritten.

    This metaphysical & surreal novel follows the character, unmistakably the reader who intends to read Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler" & doing so leads him into a quest where he constantly stumbles across different books by different authors, in this simple plot Calvino is able to bring the magical joy of reading into it, dissecting every little detail about author who writes a book, to reader who intends to read it, both casual & intense ones who criticize it with expertise. This book feels like a manual that can be followed to the T on "how to enjoy a good story" at times you will be amazed by how Calvino manages to capture your thought on pages as you read effortlessly, making it almost magical the way you find author influencing you. Calvino manages to do all this without coming out as gimmicky, everything about this novel has lots of hearts poured into it, you can see that author's insights comes out because of his severe passion to talk, discuss & meditate on art of weaving a story & make it resonate with the reader, one can deduce so much from this book, even for a casual reader looking for nothing but to kill time will find something to carry with himself from this book, that's how good it is.

    Also, Calvino shows off his mastery here, with each thread of a story shows different trends of opening a book, its often understood that first 20-50 pages of a novel are supposed to hook the reader in & rarely authors excel in doing so, but here Calvino does that every single time flawlessly, with myriad of opening pages of each story having a hook so powerful, keeps you turning page for more, without getting more philosophical or meandering Calvino manages a clever plot that may not have a believable payoff but sure exceeds your expectation, overall an excellent book, make justice to all the praise showered on it & with immense re-readable value, I am just glad I have a copy of this & can go back to it whenever I need to find the reason to why I love books.
  • Alex
    5.0 out of 5 stars Very unique book // Livre tres unique
    Reviewed in France on 25 July 2016
    This book is a great read, and extremely original. It draws the reader into the story. The only issue I had with it was that the first half of the book is more interesting. The second half drags on a little, but that is only my opinion, and I still thoroughly enjoyed reading it!

    Ce livre est une excellente lecture, et extrêmement originale. Il entraîne le lecteur dans l'histoire. La seule question que j'eus était que la première moitié du livre est plus intéressant. La seconde moitié traîne un peu, mais ceci est seulement mon opinion, et j'ai bien aimé ce livre!
  • mohamad
    5.0 out of 5 stars Super tale
    Reviewed in Canada on 5 June 2013
    One of Calvino's great works. The suspense and flow of the story is gripping as Calvino allows us to join him ion his creation. A favorite of mine.