BW29: Calvino Readalong

If not for Susan Wise Bauer's Well Educated Mind, I would have never heard of Italo Calvino's 1979 novel If on a winter's night a traveler.  It is another one of those intriguing, weirdly written books that I seem to gravitate to every few weeks.  According to Amazon:

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.  

It's a story within a story and begins with the narrator telling you how to to read the book.  The odd chapters are from a second person point of view with instructions or preparation for the next chapter and the even chapters are the story and in a variety of points of view. I'm going to be diving into the story within the next week or so.  Some of the ladies on the Well Trained Mind have decided to join me as well.


Books like these always remind me that reading is a visceral experience, a journey through a writer's creative mind and sometimes I just need to take the time to slow down, absorb, and enjoy the ride.  I was thumbing through the book and saw this sentence "An odor of frying wafts at the opening of the page, of onion in fact, onion being fried" and immediately upon reading the word wafts smelled onions even before getting to the end of the line. Now I'm hungry.  *grin*

Come along and join me in reading If on a winter's night a traveler.

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