Showing posts with label italo calvino. Show all posts
Showing posts with label italo calvino. Show all posts

"If on a winter's night a traveler..." by Italo Calvino

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

This is an incredible book.  It completely lacks the traditional structure of a novel - the reader is taken into story after story in abrupt bursts, and then becomes the protagonist of the story himself/herself!  The feeling of being drawn into a tale, only to have it abruptly taken away without giving you an ending or any resolution whatsoever... this is just one of many odd psychological tricks Calvino pulls on his readers.  Ultimately this novel is about reading, about the relationship between readers and their novels.  Sounds like it would give you a headache, but it's actually an absolute thrill to read!  I have to share my favorite quotes from this must-read.  Enjoy!

"...then a kind of weariness settles on her, perhaps only the shadow of their weariness (or my weariness, or yours).  They have known her since she was a girl, they know everything there is to know about her, some of them may have been involved with her, now water under the bridge, over and done with; in other words, there is a veil of other images that settles on her image and blurs it, 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." 19

"This is how you have changed yesterday, you who insisted you preferred a book, something solid, which lies before you, easily defined, enjoyed without risks, to a real-life experience, always elusive, discontinuous, debated." 32

"But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins?  Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.  Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue.  The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest--for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both--must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story." 153

"If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional model, perhaps four-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable.  What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space." 156

"At other times, on the contrary, I seem to understand that between the book to be written and things that already exist there can be only a kind of complementary relationship: the book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness." 172

"If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it.  The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages.  But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust." 254




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