Name: Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore
ISBN: 9781857151381

Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore

L'impresa di cercare di scrivere romanzi 'apocrifi', cioè che immagino siano scritti da un autore che non sono io e che non esiste, l'ho portata fino in fondo nel mio libro 'Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore'. E un romanzo sul piacere di leggere romanzi; protagonista è il Lettore, che per dieci volte comincia a leggere un libro che per vicissitudini estranee alla sua volontà non riesce a finire. Ho dovuto dunque scrivere l'inizio di dieci romanzi d'autori immaginari, tutti in qualche modo diversi da me e diversi tra loro... Più che d'identificarmi con l'autore di ognuno dei dieci romanzi, ho cercato d'identificarmi col lettore: rappresentare il piacere della lettura d'un dato genere, più che il testo vero e proprio. Ma soprattutto ho cercato di dare evidenza al fatto che ogni libro nasce in presenza d'altri libri, in rapporto e confronto ad altri libri.

What Hacker News says

idoubtitSep 2018

Italo Calvino is a likable person, and I'm glad he wrote one of my personal classics: "Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore" is an extraordinary book. I've also enjoyed most of his works, especially "Le città invisibili" & "Cosmicomics". If you haven't read any of these, try them or his famous trilogy: they all have that special signature of his, but they're different enough that you might like one and not the other.

About reading the classics too early, I've experienced it, but I also had the opposite feeling. I had little pleasure reading Homer when I was a teenager, but was enthusiastic about the "Odyssey" twenty years later. The translation played a big part in that change of heart, going from prose to rimes, but I believe my age and my larger culture was necessary to fully enjoy it.

On the other side, I read quite a few of Balzac's novels when in high school, and my favorites were "Eugénie Grandet" and "La peau de chagrin". Somewhere in my thirties, I reread the latter and thought it was awful, so pretentious and pseudo-philosophical that I dropped it before the end.

Reading the classics is still the best way to travel for me. I feel I've lived many years in some kind of half-mythical Russia of the last two centuries. I saw the whole Mediterranean world through Herodotus' eyes. My years as a child were heroic thanks to Dumas and Tolkien.

Later on, classics destroyed my condescending attitude to past ages. Reading "Orlando Furioso", I was astonished to read feminist opinions by a man writing around 1500. IIRC, Arioste wrote that a woman sleeping with a man before marriage was no big deal, that they should try a few guys before choosing the best one. Another Italian classic of the same period, "La Gerusalemme liberata", had the same impact on my vision of the late Middle Age, and was an even better read. For another example, as much as I adored Shakespeare as a young adult, when I discovered the Greek theater of Euripides and Sophocles, I saw that having emotional and deep characters was nothing new.

Italo Calvino did not mention a special kind of classics that many people know in an altered way: the religious literature, and especially the Bible (not the King James). Some of these texts are boring to a non-religious reader, but other are fantastic, like Job and Qohelet. To dive in an even older world, "The Epic of Gilgamesh" and a bit of Sumerian literature gave me a strong connection to people that disappeared milleniums ago.

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bshimminMar 2021

I would attach a note of caution to this - having loved the book myself, I gave my mother (a lady not terribly well-versed in postmodern literature) a copy of Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore and it took her quite some time to forgive me; she used the words "pointless" and "stupid" several times in her summary of it!

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