If on a winter's night a traveler

by Italo Calvino

You keep trying to finish a novel. It keeps disappearing.

For you if

you want to understand that reading is something you do rather than something that happens to you — through a novel that makes that argument by doing it to you

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You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel. The novel keeps being interrupted — misbound, replaced, lost, forged — and you keep trying to find the continuation. Calvino addresses the entire novel to you, the reader, in second person, making the act of reading the subject of the book itself. The formal argument is the political one: that reading is not a passive act of consumption but an active act of construction, that the reader makes the text as much as the writer does, that a story requires your participation to exist. The most accessible introduction to metafiction ever written and the most fun — it is also genuinely suspenseful despite being a novel about reading a novel. Directly relevant to DoCR: the same argument Brecht makes about theatre and Bazin makes about cinema, applied to the novel form. Dual-tagged because the formal argument is as important as the comedy.

Where This Book Lives