In if on a winters night a traveler Calvino was giving the reader so many different tangled experiences and in each chapter was very explicit explaining in detail what the reader was supposed to be experiencing while reading each different chapter or page or sentence. Calvino attempted to play with the reader’s emotions and see if he could guess or maybe control the reader’s thoughts. While he did this he also allowed the reader to make his/her own choices and come to their own conclusions regarding how they approached the novel.
In the last chapter Calvino talks about all the different ways of reading. He writes about this in other chapters as well, ludmillas style of innocent/childlike reading, lotorias analyzed reading, the editors controlled reading etc… I the last chapter Calvino writes mainly about reading that takes you away from the book as an object bring your mind away from the words written on the page to discover what is behind the words or in between them to bring your own experience to the book and then take that further somehow. Reading a few lines and then breaking off on a tangent to think about not only what those lines mean in the story you are reading but also in the larger context of the readers life and beliefs. I feel that when I have read at different times and with different books I have used everyone of the reading styles that calvino writes about in “if on a winters night a traveler” when reading Calvino’s book I approached it in the way that lotoria would have analyzing each sentence and attempting to desern some sort of meaning from the words that Calvino had written. On other occasions I have approached reading in ludmillas innocent child just waiting and watching the story unfold as I read it not taking time to think to much into the work. I have read like the editor when proofreading my own papers checking the grammar and spelling and making sure it all makes sense. I have also read in the focused distracted way that is talked about in chapter eleven. Taking all my experiences and injecting them into the story rather than just taking what the author has written by itself.
On separate occasions I have read in these separate ways. Most of the time I read though I use a mixture of these which is the way that I believe Calvino was trying to get his readers to read his novel.
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I think I read this story in a way Ludmilla would. I thought reading it and letting the story unfold in front of me would allow me to embrace whatever happened at the end (assuming there would be something that pieced it all together). Unfortunately, that didn't necessarily happen, and I was left disappointed.
ReplyDeleteMaybe he exposed all these styles to the reader to sway to reader to read one of these ways. As you read you think about these style's and maybe if you were to read the novel in different styles you could get different experiences out of it. None of these ways are technically the "correct" way to read. I think what you said makes the most sense, to mix all of the ways. You bring up a good point, you should try to mix everything and simply not read one way. It's reading one way that makes you plain and miss a few things in the story.
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