Om en vinternatt en resande by Italo Calvino

There are also phrases and descriptions that are similar between the narrative and the new stories. For example, after reading the first chapter of a detective novel, the narrative story takes on a few common detective-style themes. Themes which are introduced in each of the first chapters will then exist in succeeding narrative chapters. The chapters, which are the first chapters of different books, all push the narrative chapters along.

The second-person narrative passages develop into a fairly cohesive novel that puts its two protagonists on the track of an international book-fraud conspiracy, a mischievous translator, a reclusive novelist, a collapsing publishing house, and several repressive governments. All are broken off, for various reasons explained in the interspersed passages, most of them at some moment of plot climax. Eventually the reader meets a woman named Ludmilla, who is also addressed in her own chapter, separately, and also in the second person.Īlternating between second-person narrative chapters of this story are the remaining (even) passages, each of which is a first chapter in ten different novels, of widely varying style, genre, and subject-matter. (Some contain further discussions about whether the person narrated as 'you' is the same as the 'you' who is actually reading.) These chapters concern the reader's adventures in reading Italo Calvino's novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. That is, they concern events purportedly happening to the novel's reader. The odd-numbered passages and the final passage are narrated in the second person. The book begins with a chapter on the art and nature of reading, and is subsequently divided into twenty-two passages. The book was published in an English translation by William Weaver in 1981. The second half is always about something different from the previous ones. The second half is the first part of a new book that the reader ('you') finds. The first section of each chapter is in second person, and describes the process the reader goes through to attempt to read the next chapter of the book they are reading.

Each chapter is divided into two sections.

The postmodernist narrative, in the form of a frame story, is about the reader trying to read a book called If on a winter's night a traveler. If on a winter's night a traveler ( Italian: Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore) is a 1979 novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino.

Om en vinternatt en resande by Italo Calvino