If on a Winters Night a Treaveler

Italo Calvinos novel “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” is written very mysteriously almost like a labyrinth within a book. I found my thoughts of frustration over the constant shifts in the story mirrored in the numbered chapters. In these chapters the reader who I am to believe is me is constantly trying to get past the first chapters of several books. Each time he gets into a story there is a problem. The story is misprinted, or un-translated, or incomplete. I think the point of this is to mirror your frustration at not being able to go beyond the first chapter of these stories as well.

To make sense of what I was reading I attempted to draw similarities between each chapter. I will focus on identifying and maybe explaining these similarities.
In each chapter we are expecting to read a certain story. The first story we expect is “If on a Winters Night a Traveler” instead we get a misprint that is instead the story “Outside the Town of Malbrock” we then try to read further into this story but in the next chapter the reader ends up purchasing some unknown Cimmerian novel. This continues for the rest of the chapters. I think that this ads a mysterious to the book; the reader has no idea what he/she is reading and is constantly being lied to by the author.

Another similarity is the female characters in each chapter. Madame Marne, Ludmilla, Zwilda in 2 chapters. Each of these women is shrouded in mystery and each of them is the object of desire for the main character.

Ludmilla is the readers desire we chase after her trying to set up situations where we can meet her. To some extent we aren’t interested in finishing the story but rather in learning more about her.

Zwida Ozkart is interesting to me because from what I can tell of the story that she is in she is in love with Ponko Kauderer. They are from two different rival families much like Romeo and Juliet.

There are many similarities between each chapter and I said I would try to explain these but I have only become more confused after writing some of them down. I feel that the beginning of the book was very inviting lulling me into a state of relaxation. This was all a lie I wasn’t even reading the book I thought I was “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” I was really reading “Outside the Town of Malbrock” this trickery went further with the interchanging of perspectives that interchange with each chapter and also in the chapters themselves. Even with all of this I am still very interested in not only the story but also the way it is told.

In the chapters Calvino writes what a reader might be thinking about the story almost making up our minds for us as we read “ You, reader, believed that there, on the platform, my gaze was glued to the hands of the round clock of an old station…But who can say that the clock’s numbers aren’t peeping from behind rectangular windows” (13) in this segment he is basically telling the reader not to assume anything about his story. I thought that this was very interesting because this is what we naturally do when given a story that has so many wholes we try to make connections and assumptions and attempt to fill in the wholes that are left blank, but maybe we are not supposed to make connections but just be carried along and put our trust in Calvino? Another line that made me think of something similar was on page 19 when he is describing Madame Marne “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.” We are obviously not supposed to expect this novel to be like any other that we have read which so far is true.