You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You like it. But alas there is a printer's error in your copy. You take it back to the shop and get a replacement. But the replacement seems to be a totally different story. You try to track down the original book you were reading but end up with a different narrative again. This remarkable novel leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary and a quest. But the real hero is you, the reader.
Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in Italy. He was an essayist and journalist and a member of the editorial staff of Einaudi in Turin. One of the most respected writers of the twentieth century, his best-known works of fiction include Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Marcovaldo and Mr Palomar. In 1973 he won the prestigious Premio Feltrinelli. He died in 1985. A collection of Calvino's posthumous personal writings, The Hermit in Paris, was published in 2003.
Title: If On A Winter's Night A Traveller (Vintage classics)
Author: Italo Calvino
ISBN: 9780099430896
Binding:
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Publication Date: 1992-02-20
Number of Pages: 272
Weight: 0.1996 kg
Ingenious * Mail on Sunday, *Summer reads of 2019* *
Mind-bending and thoroughly post-modern, Calvino's masterpiece of self-reference ('you' are part of the plot), its dizzyingly clever, labyrinthine construction has made it a classic -- Marc Chacksfield * ShortList *
Breathtakingly inventive -- David Mitchell
The greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century * Guardian *
Reading Calvino, you're constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before.This is highly unnerving: fortunately you're usually too busy laughing to go mad... I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends -- Salman Rushdie