If on a winter's night a traveler (1979)
Italo Calvino (Everyman's Library, 1993; trans. W. Weaver)

254 pp. First reading.
Posted 7 February 2007.


You are about to begin reading Craig Burrell's new Book Note, about Italo Calvino's novel If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice -- they won't hear you otherwise -- "I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: "I'm beginning to read Craig Burrell's new Book Note!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.

I had always considered 1979 to be a pretty good year. My sister was born in that year, and she has so far been an unequivocal blessing. On the other hand, Italo Calvino's novel If on a winter's night a traveler was also published in that year.

For several years you have no doubt had your eye on this novel. When you enter a book store, you think of it and go over to check the shelves, just to see if it's there. Perhaps once or twice you have seen it, but in Italian: Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. It sounds better in Italian (of course), but even so it's not much use to you, is it? What was it that fascinated you? You didn't know what it was about, after all. Your opinion of it, your persistent attraction to it, can only have been based on something you did know -- like the title. Why should you hide your smile? It is a very fine title. If you had to express its best quality in one word it would be this: evocative. It conjures up a wind-swept street, snow-covered beneath a callow moon, and a dark silhoutte stepping up to the door. If on a winter's night a traveler. You have circled around it like a moth circles a flame. Yes, the image is apt.

If on a winter's night a traveler were to carry this book to an evening graduate seminar in an English department, you can surely imagine the consequences. Initial suspicion (what are you doing there, after all?) would yield to cautious interest (if you read them a page or two) which would grow, now by steady degrees, now by sharp steps, until at the half-way mark their heads, one by one, would begin to explode. It's just that kind of book. Authors and their identities, texts and their meanings, readers and their responses, translators and their traitorousness -- it's all here! Is this a novel or a treatise? Is it one book or many? Is it the pool of Narcissus or a hall of mirrors? Who is the author? Why are you reading it? Run away!

The Caliph Harun-al-Rashid one night, in the grip of insomnia, disguises himself as a merchant and goes out into the streets of Baghdad. A boat carries him along the waters of the Tigris to the gate of a garden. At the edge of a pool a maiden beautiful as the moon is singing, accompanying herself on the lute. A slave girl admits Harun to the palace and makes him put on a saffron-colored cloak. The maiden who was singing in the garden is seated on a silver chair. On cushions around her are seated seven men wrapped in saffron-colored cloaks. "Only you were missing," the maiden says, "you are late"; and she invites you to sit on a cushion at her side. "Noble sirs, you have sworn to obey me blindly, and now the moment has come to put you to the test."

Well, perhaps we can leave it at that.

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