If on a winter's night a reader

I am presently drunk with euphoria after reading If on a winter's night a traveller, by Italo Calvino. As if a homeopathic dose of the proverbial 'Whatever the author is smoking (I want some of that)', amplified by serial draftings and editings, has overwhelmed me.

There are the works that arouse in my pen hand a wanderlust, a desire to once more take flight and set words on paper, knowing that my writing has improved by mere exposure to the author's shadow. And then there are the works so far beyond sublime they are lime; they paralyse that same hand into inaction, for no words I write can ever compare.

If on a winter's night a traveller is both.

Clever, witty, funny, crazy, eclectic, erudite, multi-layered, profound, poetic, postmodern, unputdownable... the adjectives for Italo Calvino's masterpiece abound. It is a book about readers and reading, writers and writing. Such metabooks often attract criticisms of intellectual wankery, but as a book about a book it puts even The Shadow of the Wind to shame, with its structure variously attributed in-text to an international book fraud cult and a writer suffering from the block, who decides to write a book in which a character reading books finds himself interrupted after each first chapter and ends up with the first chapter of yet another book. It is a world where nothing is what it seems.

What is the main draw? There is something for every reader, from the nested narratives and postmodern philosophical musings to the lucid writing that still manages to fit in brilliant turns of phrase to the riveting first chapters of various stylistically-diverse airport novels written by a hand too masterly to be writing airport novels. There are even some outstanding sex scenes, such as one in the form of a philosophical/psychological/linguistic/semantic discussion. Which could have been some form of allegory or metaphor anyway.

This is a book I would very much like to own in the original Italian, but having read it in English I must credit the translator William Weaver for a job well done, especially since the enigmatic bogeyman-villain of the story, Ermes Marana, is a translator as well (although in fairness the unseen character is the most intriguing in the book).

I am not wont to hyperbole, but this may just be the best book I will ever read in my life. Thankfully, it is one which may be reread many times without losing its magic, and one which demands rereading to glean its many layers and meanings, to ponder its philosophies and bons mots and to explore the act of reading. And for a book that considers books to be mere springboards for the act of reading, it has surely transcended its physical bookliness.