Ahhh, the 30-second ad! Such a neglected part of our lives, don’t you think? Well take heed friends, because that is the substance of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.

The book starts reasonably happily, congratulating you on your fine choice and advising you to find a reading position that is just right, alas I never manage to find it and instead of actually reading I sit there thinking that my knee hurts or the light is bad.

You, the Reader, or the Reader in the book that is not you, or perhaps both, walk into a bookshop, buy a book and shortly realise that chapter 2 has no relevance to chapter 1. Naturally concluding that this is some kind of error, you/protagonist take it back to the shop where we meet another reader with the same problem, who was strangely a character we’d previously met in the book we just bought. The two engage on a journey in order to find the completed manuscript of the first book but without much luck. Fiction and reality collide in this oddly mesmerising tangle of identity between narrator, protagonist and “you.”

Along the road we then get the sense of a frustrated writer(s?), who can’t finish anything but then comes to understand that all the unfinished works contributed as much to their body of work as the finished tales themselves. We are left with this notion that all books essentially make up the one book and that to read one book is to read all books. It’s a good boost to the ego to think that when I’m reading Harry Potter it’s actually War and Peace.

Throughout the book Calvino gives us a sense of continuity in reading the beginnings of 10 completely separate stories that mix and blur with the never-ending quest to find the “finished” work, if such a thing even truly exists. Just like TV where the utter randomness of ads seems to make sense to the watcher, so too are these short snippets of the starts of novels cohesive. It is the kind of book that will make you watch half an hour of 1-2 minute descriptions of what happened today and think twice about how it manages to be one program.

The writing is easy going and the ideas never get in the way of Calvino’s main purpose of story telling, which is spattered with his natural, unpretentious humour. An excellent book with easy, bearable prose and cool ideas.

3.5 literary trifles out of 5.