Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Unavailable
If on a winter's night a traveler
Unavailable
If on a winter's night a traveler
Unavailable
If on a winter's night a traveler
Ebook293 pages5 hours

If on a winter's night a traveler

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this ebook

These seemingly disparate characters gradually realize their connections to each other just as they realize that something is not quite right about their world. And it seems as though the answers might lie with Hawthorne Abendsen, a mysterious and reclusive author whose bestselling novel describes a world in which the US won the War... The Man in the High Castle is Dick at his best, giving readers a harrowing vision of the world that almost was. “The single most resonant and carefully imagined book of Dick’s career.” ??—??New York Times

Editor's Note

The Joy of Reading...

Although it is constructed as an anti-novel, with each chapter starting a new story and ending with a cliffhanger, this inventive novel embodies the great joy we feel when we start a new book.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherMariner Books
Release dateOct 25, 2012
ISBN9780544133402
Author

Italo Calvino

ITALO CALVINO (1923–1985) attained worldwide renown as one of the twentieth century’s greatest storytellers. Born in Cuba, he was raised in San Remo, Italy, and later lived in Turin, Paris, Rome, and elsewhere. Among his many works are Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveler, The Baron in the Trees, and other novels, as well as numerous collections of fiction, folktales, criticism, and essays. His works have been translated into dozens of languages.

Read more from Italo Calvino

Related to If on a winter's night a traveler

Classics For You

View More

Reviews for If on a winter's night a traveler

Rating: 4.091463414634147 out of 5 stars
4/5

164 ratings120 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A crazy ride of a story, in which the Reader is the main character who is simply trying to read a book, but who gets frustrated at every turn and by more and more outlandish disruptions. Each new manuscript promises to be the completion of the previous, but only introduces yet another new book, which, in turn, is cut short and unfinished. Chapters of this main plot (which also contains an Other Reader, with whom the Reader carries out a love story of sorts, and a romp of a detective story as well) alternate with the actual first chapters of the unfinished manuscripts, which themselves leave the (R/r)eader genuinely frustrated and wanting more.In short, it's a hoot, although it does get a bit bogged down in its own absurdities toward the end, I feel. Think Inspector Clouseau meets Arabian Nights meets a Choose Your Own Adventure book in which all the choices are just tantalizingly out of your reach, and then throw in a healthy pinch of musings on the nature of readers, authors, books, and the act of reading itself.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This would have to be one of the most unusually good books I have read. It is not quite a novel and not quite a collection of short stories, organised in an unusual way. It is partly written in the second person (Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City was my first second-person novel) and on several occasions, the author speaks directly to the reader (a literary technique known as "authorial intrusion"). The main story is structured using numbered chapters, interspersed with the beginnings of several books (with the relevant book names as chapter headings) that relate directly to the main story. It is rather complex in terms of its structure and I couldn't help thinking it is very much a "post-modern" novel. But it works. I am often surprised by the number of books that are about books and authors, a bit like 42nd Street - a musical within a musical. But this book is very clever. While at times I couldn't help thinking that Calvino had turned a number of "false starts" into a publication, it is too good to have been written so perfunctorily. Two stand-out parts work for me. First, Calvino addresses two types of writers (pp. 173-4):One of the two is a productive writer, the other a tormented writer. The tormented writer watches the productive writer filling pages with uniform lines, the manuscript growing in a pile of neat pages. In a little while the book will be finished: certainly a best seller - the tormented writer thinks with a certain contempt but also with envy. He considers the productive writer no more than a clever craftsman, capable of turning out machine-made novels catering to the taste of the public; but he cannot repress a strong feeling of envy for that man who expresses himself with such methodological confidence... [The productive writer] feels [the tormented writer] is struggling with something obscure, a tangle, a road to be dug leading no one knows where... and he is overcome with admiration. Not only admiration, but also envy; because he feels how limited his work is, how superficial compared with what the tormented writer is seeking.I certainly feel like each of these authors depending on the type of writing I am engaged in. That self-consciousness is part of the process is something that Calvino weaves into the plot perfectly. Second, Calvino picks up on how I read (p. 254):Reading is a discontinuous and fragmentary operation.What I find most interesting about this reflection is that Calvino's work, or at least the several of his works I have read so far, all seem to play to the discontinuous and fragmentary reader. The structure of this work, much like Invisible Cities and Mr Palomar, suits a style of reader who is unable to read in large chunks of time. While not being able to read long and uninterrupted is far from ideal, Calvino's work is presented in convenient and memorable chunks that suit the fragmentary and disrupted peace of the post-modern worker. There is still a little more of Calvino's work for me to read, but I have now covered his most famous works. And I am delighted to have "discovered" Marcovaldo in a Shanghai bookstore which introduced me to one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century only a few years ago.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was every bit as good as the last time that I read it.

    For me, this is an 'event book', one of those novels that divides reading into a before and after. Wikipedia quotes David Mitchell as saying that the book has dated and is less impressive than it was. I suspect that I know which writer's work will still be read a hundred years from now (and Calvino's already been dead for three decades)... IOAWNAT is an education for any novelist wishing to experiment with the form. And at the same time, it really is laugh-out-loud funny for much of the time. Echoes of Borges' 'Fictions' reverberate around this novel and it's none the worse for that. It has to be read for Chapter 9 alone, the Ataguitania sequence, one of the smartest, funniest passages of writing in modern fiction.

    In case you don't know this book, I'm not going to give away anything about the story. Suffice to say, I loved it but for those looking for a 'safe' read, this isn't it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Beautiful, brilliant, smart and weird. All I need from book to love it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    There are some books that you can come back and read for leisure, some for fun, some so that you can understand it better;its symbols and innuendos..
    This book, it can be read for all those reasons.. summed up together. Looking for another read of this...
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I loved how Calvino describes reading in the opening chapter and then how he inserts bits of the writing and reading process throughout the book. I'm also frustrated, because like the Reader, I want to continue reading all of the beginnings. There were a few bits, namely Chapter 9, that were a bit too Kafkaesque for my taste.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Playful satire on the act of reading and the struggle to create the perfect novel. Calvino toys with the conventions of genre and the issues of national literature and censorship, creating a sense of vertigo for the reader while always exercising a firm authorial control. Brilliant. Try this if you like Borges or Eco.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a book that, if it sounds interesting to you, it is probably worth trying.As it turned out, I really didn't like it.It has some interesting things to say on reading and writing, but I had a couple of major problems with it.The first, is that the story is written in the second person. Outside of a Chose Your Own Adventure, I've always found second person POV very distancing from the story, even when "you" is clearly a character in the book, not the reader. In this case, "you" is explicitly the person reading the book, and "you, the reader" are unambiguously male, which I am not. It helped, somewhat, when I mentally recast the POV character as Bob.The other problem I had may be partly caused by the translation, certainly it is partly due to my personal tastes. That problem is the books Bob starts, but never manages to finish. They make up half the book and I had two issues with them. 1)They all felt like they were written by the same person. Okay, they were, but in the book they're supposed to be by different authors and in different genres, but they never captured that feeling. Maybe they were more distinct in the original or maybe this was just beyond the author's ability. (I suppose it's possible this was a deliberate choice too.)2)They were all boring and I honestly couldn't understand why Bob would go to such lengths to try to finish reading them. The most promising one involved two characters having a hard time disposing of a corpse, but it was full of just as many dull introspective passages and poorly flowing flashbacks as all the rest. What should have been tense, or funny, ended up a snoozefest.I don't regret reading it, it was short enough that it didn't massively overstay its welcome, but I have no urge to reread it or read anything else by the author.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An interesting attempt at involving the reader as more than just a passive observer. What appears at first to be a simple printer's error evolves into something much weirder. Ultimately though, I liked the first and last framing chapters the best, and I liked some of the "first chapters" but disliked others. That's the best description for this that I can think of, it's a book of first chapters.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    There are terribly few authors that can write experimentally while remaining humorous, engaging, and heartfelt. Calvino is one of the bunch. Each chapter of this book manages to capture the reader's attention in new and unexpected ways- all while maintaining a separate narrative and thematic thread. Probably a great place to start for someone new to his work...though my favorites remain Invisible CIties and The Baron in the Trees.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I should really finish re-reading this for a book club before I write a full review...let's just say that this one is probably Calvino's most experimental (atleast of the ones I've read) and is just as challenging as it is rewarding. There are abrupt discontinuations of plots and characters and at least five mismatched stories meshed into one...it begins in a fairly half-hazard way after Calvino invites you to get comfortable (do put your feet up, now!) and free yourself from any interruptions. Pretty soon, we go back and forth between the novel characters and the characters of the people reading it whose novels were misprinted and what they were reading turns out to be a Polish novel...


    The readers of the original novel buy the Polish novel, which is nothing like what they (or we) were reading and that turns out to be something else entirely. We are continually addressed as the reader and so is the reader searching to simply finish the original story. I'm up to pg. 63 again and I have no idea what story I'm reading or when it switched from one to another at this point (even though I've read this 5 yrs. ago, that doesn't seem to help.) We become like the readers who believe the book was misprinted and they will never get back to the original story...somehow, we feel lost in the plot. There's a little bit in us that suffers the loss of what could have been with each character we lose track of. We find ourselves not wanting to make permanent relationships with the new characters, thinking we will soon lose track of them again anyhow.


    The very fact of the matter is, I believe Calvino does this purposefully...it's as if he is examining simultaneously the process of reading with the process of writing. It's mainly about form at this point though if memory serves, there is more substance at later points. In any case, a must for fans of experimental fiction, esp. if willing to struggle with the unpredictable and disorienting.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Such an amazingly inventive and sophisticatedly wacky novel! Really a unique read and totally worth it!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    "YO DAWG, I HEARD YOU LIKE READING, SO I PUT A BOOK IN YO' BOOK, SO YOU CAN READ WHILE YO' READ."
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    During my reading of this book (not even my first Calvino) all I could think of was "gee, post-modern!" After reading it I read a few other reviews which all seemed to make prominent use of the "p.m." word.

    Much as I dislike all the open subjectivity; the noodling, Philosophy seminar rambling; the plastic taste and chilled emotion; irony galore... all those pomo standards... Calvino makes it more fun than his contemporaries.

    Some of his devices are a bit forced I think, and don't quite live up to what I think he may have hoped for (the 2nd person narrative--wasn't buying it.) Still he's irreverently fun, clever in his plot twists and unlike many deeply post-modern authors, his points are worth their bulk.

    Start with Invisible Cities or Numbers in the Dark though.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I've wanted to read this book for years, purely based on the title. It was nothing like I was expecting - it's a post-modern tour de force, which is more about why we read and what we experience or expect when we do read, rather than a straightforward narrative. A quotation from the book sums it up: "He always feels as if he is on the verge of grasping the decisive point, but then it eludes him and he is left with a sensation of uneasiness".Beautifully written, thought-provoking, and clever, but don't read it you are looking for a story in which to lose yourself.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Sometimes I felt like the Reader searching for the ending to every book he started in 'If On A Winter's Night A Traveler'. I had been searching for any copy of this book for years, and then I found the very edition I wanted: with the three different colored, different sized Calvino books stacked on the cover. It's perfect. (I'm always lucky on betterworldbooks.com!) Calvino starts with an amazing first chapter that will hook any book fan. I had a laugh when it described the Reader turning to the back of the book first, to see how many pages there were. I had just done the same thing with this book! I love the image of the war zone in the bookshop: books in ranks ready to ambush you with categories like "Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages" or "Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves" [pg.5]. I think the first chapter is the best set-up and the best part.. though the whole book is amazing. The Reader starts 'If On A Winter's Night A Traveler' but finds he has a defective copy. While he is at the bookshop complaining, he meets the Other Reader, there for the same reason. They both are led from one book to the next, trying to find an ending to the previous book, but only finding more books without endings, missing for different reasons. Each of the stories here are perfect on their own, even if they do not have endings. I thought it would be irritating reading a bunch of stories without endings, but without the cliffhangers, they wouldn't be the same. I couldn't single out any of the stories because they are all unique, interesting, memorable. But the alternating Reader chapters had even more interesting ideas (usually about books), and no matter how fun the stories were, I still wanted to get back to the Reader's journey. Along the way he meets: the Unreader who'd rather make art from books instead of read them, the Other Reader's sister who reads books by finding out the frequently used words with a program and deciding what the book is like that way, Silas Flannery who wrote some of the stories.. or maybe it was the "treacherous translator" who wrote them. This book is definitely a fun time for book nerds. With the entire book full of speculations on all things books, I'd say Calvino wrote a love letter to books. It's tough to compare it to anything else. This is very worthy for the 1001 list. Possibly my favorite book of the year...no definitely. I can't wait to read more from Calvino, and I'm glad I was able to eventually find a copy of this one!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Sometimes the descriptions of books are more interesting than the actual book, and to an extent, this is the case with this book by Calvino. It is a "novel" written in the second person, which concerns a Reader whose efforts to finish a book are continually thwarted, leading him on a quest which results in reading the beginning of ten different books instead of ever getting to the end of the one he started. In fact, most of the ten beginnings Calvino presents work well as self-contained short stories. Only a couple really left me wanting to know what happens next, so one could assume that the whole construct of ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER is just a framework for the author to present these stories. Calvino is doing a lot more than that, however. Each story is quite different in subject matter and, at least somewhat, in style. I say "somewhat" because the voice I kept hearing throughout this book was that of Jorge Luis Borges, whose own stories provided a similar (though more intense) sense of intellectual exploration, alternate realities, and the importance of literature. To his credit, Calvino is funnier (and more erotic) than Borges. The framework story of the Reader seeking the companionship of a female reader, who like him, started with an incomplete copy of ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER, is entertaining and comes to a nice conclusion. Along the way, Calvino tells us a lot about writers, writing, readers, and reading. Much of it is fascinating, and anyone who feels consumed by the need to devour books (as I do) can't help but be amused and entertained along the way. Still, at the end, I wasn't left with the feeling of having read a great literary classic--just a clever book by an intelligent writer.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Intermittently fascinating and dull. Mostly, it's a book about how reading and writing are structured, and many compelling ideas are raised and examined. But this is interspersed with excerpts from "novels" that are supposed to engage yet never satisfy the reader... unfortunately, I thought these ersatz novels almost universally banal, and found myself skimming them.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    thorold's new review of Italo Calvino's novel If on a winter's night a traveller, which you are about to begin reading, is a little masterpiece of the form: not at all the sort of half-baked amateur reviewing you would expect to find on the internet, but more the sort of thing to be savoured in the august columns of one of the snootier literary reviews. It is elegant, concise, and will give you the clearest possible idea of what the experience of reading the book might be like. In fact, it almost renders the actual reading of the book superfluous. Surprisingly for thorold, a reviewer who has previously shown a ponderous propensity to parade parody and pomposity before us (who could forget his painfully silly review of the Oxford University Examination decrees and regulations?), on this occasion he has found just the right line, avoiding both infantile humour and sententious pontification. Superfluous and excessive redundant adjectives are banished, adverbs quietly suppressed, and the sentence structure is crisp and sharp. This is a review to be read reclining in a leather armchair with a glass of dry sherry at your elbow. It is a review, indeed, that might be said to require a plate of cashew nuts and a string quartet playing Haydn. Sit back, relax, and enjoy it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A lot of style and not a lot of substance. Or at least not enough for me. Calvino's craftsmanship earns a positive review.I would recommend Pale Fire over this one.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    IoaWNaT employs the rarely used 2nd-person point of view. It begins with describing you in the act of preparing to read the book, as the author makes broad assumptions about you in order to be inclusive and draw you in. Later on, Calvino establishes a more specific character for you and some fictional events: you are male, and you encounter printing errors with your copy. This begins your quest to find a correctly printed one, only to encounter a sequence of other novel fragments that for various reasons also break off and leave you hanging.The impression isn't so much that of a proper novel as of a collection of unfinished short works that showcase various styles and aims, linked together by an artful framing story. I read it initially as an ode to the importance and love of reading, seeing it as a metafiction - fiction about fiction, like I'd previously encountered through allegory in Ende's "The Neverending Story." There's still the other side of the coin to be considered, and a great part of the fun lies in the slow reveal of what exactly the author is driving at with all this peculiar construction.I liked the inserted sly, self-aware commentary on how each story was being told, and how this later spills over into the portions between. During the bridging segments I began to anticipate Ludmilla's veiled introductions to each story with her "the novel I would like to read now" dialogue. Meanwhile, Calvino doesn't merely display his talents as a virtuoso in accomplishing each instance of what Ludmilla is seeking; he relates the inner workings of each narrator's mind to determine why they would want to tell their story in the way Ludmilla describes. IoaWNaT takes a while to live up to its first chapter's promise as a book to get lost in, but it does come - for me it finally happened with Chapter Eight's explicit outline of intent. This puzzle of a book was ultimately very rewarding, and I see more Italo Calvino in my future.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I had really high expectations for this one. I did love some parts, especially the last two chapters, but other parts were an absolute chore and I couldn't keep interested. However, it's undeniably clever, very imaginative and a worthy read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Though difficult at times, I found this novel generally rewarding. It started out wonderfully, but did bog down toward the end. It is notable as an important work of its time, but it holds up as more than a mere historical slice of post-modernism. Calvino is an impressively intelligent writer. If you like Borges and Eco, this is worth a read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of my favourite postmodern works. The narrative within the narrative lends a very interesting dimension to the book. The final point of the book, however,may seem to be lost while the reader tries to bring the threads of the stories together. The end result, though a loose end, is in fact quite satisfying. I would love to re-read this again and again.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of the few books I know of written in second person perspective. A true book-lover's book, spiraling around itself over and over, turning meta and metaphor on their heads. It's absolutely crazy and you might really hate it or you might laugh from the very beginning and love every second of it. I own three editions of this book and look forward to re-reading it several times.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Much of the time while reading Italo Calvino's "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler" I felt like I was examining a beautiful treasure map from an ancient, long lost culture -- I could appreciate the map for its aesthetic qualities but would have no clue where it was telling me to go. For much of the novel, I wondered if Calvino just decided he had a bunch of half-started stories he wanted to get rid of so he found a way to toss them into a novel. All that said, I really enjoyed the book anyway, even though it took me until the penultimate chapter to understand what the heck was going on. I found the stories (told in an alternating manner of a reader just trying to find the ending to a book...) and the various stories so compelling it was tough to put the book down. The narrative structure alone makes this an interesting read and it's really interesting how the story comes together in the end.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Or "Nine First Chapters In Search of a Narrative" Calvino's "If On a Winter's Night a Traveler" might be the thorniest, grandest, most ambitious post-everything meta-novel I've ever read. It's full of starts, stops, in-jokes and digressions, but in the end, it turns out to be an interesting, and perhaps even heartfelt, meditation on the act of reading. Indeed, even readers that would rather skip Calvino's philosophizing and theorizing might be able to identify with his characters' unquenchable desires to curl up with a good book and sink into an engrossing narrative. Both the author's descriptions of reading, which are sensuous to the point of decadence, and his semi-serious theorizing posit that escape through literature is one of life's most fundamental, and perhaps guiltiest, pleasures. Even though it sings the praises of readers and reading, "If On a Winter's Night" is a pretty difficult proposition. I started it three or four times before being able to read it through. Even the novel's "literary" chapters are stuffed with subtle connections, word games, and odd stylistic stratagems. Calvino seems to want to get his readers to slow down and think about the way that we read, to reconsider a process that most of us perform automatically and, in a sense, unthinkingly. He even describes the letters on the pages of his novel taking on the characteristics of the story they tell, almost becoming physical elements in the fictional universe that they're creating. Still, difficult as it is, the book is not without it's humor. "Winter's Night" sometimes recalls Thomas Pynchon in his loopy, conspiracy-minded mode, and the plot of Calvino's novel, if it can be called that, features dysfunctional publishing houses, female commandos, and secret agents all obsessed to the point of fanaticism with literary fiction. Still, it's obvious that Calvino has written these nine beginnings in order to further his discussion about literary theory and the art of reading, and many readers will, I fear, find them a bit stiff. I could blame his translator - the novel's own characters would - but I get the impression that Calvino's a better theorist than a storyteller. It's another sort of book entirely, but David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas," which seems to have borrowed heavily from Calvino's bag of tricks, pulled the novels-within-novels trope off much more gracefully. At its close, the "Winter's Night" drifts towards a netherworld reminiscent, perhaps, of Borges, as the author asks some basic questions about what literature is trying to accomplish and why we, as readers, feel compelled to read it. The answers he comes up with a thought provoking and perhaps even inspiring. I'm glad I had the patience and fortitude to conquer this one.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    While many other works of metafiction appeal to the minds of writers, the playful and enigmatic 'If on a winter's night a traveler' was created more for the individuals who identify themselves as avid readers. In fact, you as the reader take on the role of the protagonist. With each chapter, you (you - the Reader) begin reading a book and for varying reasons have to cease this endeavor, always right at the peak of suspense. Snapped back into reality, the Reader has to track down what has happened to the remainder of the story, only to find and begin other stories along the way - all of which end just as abruptly. In this journey to find a tale that ends, the Reader encounters a beautiful woman who shares his passion for reading. The two find themselves caught up conspiracies regarding the falsification and ghostwriting of other novels by multitudes of secret organizations and counter-organizations. Author Italo Calvino asks the reader (Reader?) several open-ended questions regarding how we read books and the roles of both the author and reader. There is a specific focus on what books mean to certain people, as well as what makes a work authentic or original. These interesting conversations provide a lot to think about, although I'd be lying if I said this were an easy read. Some portions are rather difficult to get through, and a few of the mini-novels don't hold up to be as engaging as the others. Regardless, if you have the time and are feeling up to reading a strange, playful, meta-and-then-some book, you'll get a kick out of this.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    An adventure story about reading, and writing, and creating, and falsifying, and re-creating, and translating, and living. An adventure story about the Gift (the Spirit) that is Literature. A Book about Why, How, When, What, and Where we read Literature. A Book about the Pure Pleasure of Literature. A Book where Form and Content are one in the same. I couldn't stop reading this. I wanted to be forever entangled within its web, its kaleidoscope of characters and worlds, its stories within stories interrupted. And that's why of course, I could never --
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Really fantastic book! I can't resist the books that start out in second-person, thus speaking directly to me. In the beginning, it really seemed as if the narrator was in my mind and I could actually imagine myself being the Reader. As I read farther, the Reader started to develop more characteristics (such as being male, for one) so that feeling of being an actual character in the book didn't last, but I still loved it. The chapters that focused on the Reader were my favorite of the novel, and I sped through those parts. The stories told were pretty interesting too, except for a couple that I really coudn't get into: Without fear of wind or vertigo and In a network of lines that intersect weren't really to my taste, but that was bound to happen considering how different each story is from the other. Looks down in the gathering shadow was by far my favorite of the ten stories. I wish that one was a full-length novel (I truly felt the Reader's frustration in not being able to finish that particular book). What a way to begin a story!--a man driving around with a dead guy that he's trying to get rid of. How Calvino set up the stories in the first few chapters was amazing. Here's a sample from the opening of the first story, If on a winter's night a traveler: The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph...The pages of the book are clouded like the windows of an old train, the cloud of smoke rests on the sentences. I repeat: A-ma-zing. It really makes you feel as if you're sitting right in the middle of the action and that you're truly a part of the setting. He doesn't use this method of immersion in all the stories, unfortunately, but the entire book is truly wonderful. It's a new favorite of mine.