Critics term Italo Calvino as the most brilliant Italian writer of the 20th century. If on a winter’s night a traveler is a singular example of his mastery of the written word. Being a sucker for sophisticated Italian men and compelling writing, I picked up a copy of this book and was immediately intrigued by Calvino’s overriding premise—that a novel is a form capable of countless changes. Though the book can be labeled by the terms postmodernism and fabulism, a complete understanding of these terms is unnecessary in the superficial enjoyment of the novel, which was first published in Italy in 1979 and translated to English in 1981.

From his opening lines, Calvino takes the normal literary conventions of protagonist, conflict and plot and turns them upside down by creating two disparate types of chapters that rotate in order. The first type of chapter is numbered in sequence and is written from a second person point of view that addresses, you, the reader. Consider these chapters a sort of instruction manual for reading, as well as a casual but brilliant exploration of postmodernist thought. The narrator informs you that “you’re the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything”—the essence of postmodernism. These chapters essentially help to prepare you for the other section of chapters, which are based on meta-fictional plots (books within books).

With this premise of “reading for the sake of reading” in mind, the other chapters of the book take the reader through a complex labyrinth of plots and characters that form ten distinct novellas. A strange continuity links the ten separate plots—the Reader opens Calvino’s book, only to find that it is a defective copy that has a different book within it. This initial “error” sets up a chain reaction of events that lead the Reader and his mysterious companion, Ludmilla, on a journey through more books and challenges that include dead languages, tyrannical governments and strange translators. The titles of these chapters in themselves form a lyrical sentence that ultimately asks where stories come from. Each section references the other, yet can also stand alone—a truly remarkable feat of Calvino’s in creating his literary universe. Critics have compared Calvino to J.L. Borges and Umberto Eco, and his canon of work won much critical acclaim throughout the 20th century.
The uniqueness of this novel begs the question of Calvino’s larger purpose, a thought expressed in the chapter In a network of lines that intersect: “a system of mirrors would multiply my image to infinity and reflect its essence in a single image [and] would then reveal to me the soul of the universe, which is hidden in mine.”

Calvino challenges the reader to consider the purpose of writing in understanding “the soul of the universe,” or more generically, the meaning of life and how we find it. Whether or not writing and reading are valid approaches to finding this is up to the reader, a judgment Calvino gladly relinquishes to the individual. After all, in postmodernist thought, who is the author to determine any level of meaning for the reader?