The longer I was reading this book, for the third or fourth time, the harder I found it to finish. There were several points over the fortnight I was reading it when I really believed I could find myself reading it for years. Sentence by sentence, idea by idea.
I first read the novel as an eighteen year old. I have a memory of mentioning it in a Eng lit class of Lachlan Mackinnon. In relation to Shakespeare’s technical ingenuity. Or something pretentious like that. I recall being dazzled by it. Hard not to be, on the first time of reading. Re-reading again, certain passages are lodged in the brain. The ringing phone. The vision of the world stripped bare. There is much that is still breathtaking.
At the same time, even works of structural genius start to date. There’s something a little tired about the depiction of women. Even if the writer seeks to acknowledge this. The novel has more context now. Structural ingenuity went mainstream with David Mitchell, David Nicholls, Tom McCarthy among others in the UK, not to mention those beyond these island shores. People have read Borges now, if not Cortazar. Of course, Calvino himself was writing within the tradition of the nouveau roman, not to mention Sterne, Rabelais et al.
In a sense I can’t help thinking that Calvino failed, for all the brilliance of If On A Winter’s Night. He should never have stopped writing it. The idea and the novel deserve to be a thousand chapters or a thousand years long. Perhaps I slowed down because I didn’t want to finish. The idea is infinite. It should never end. Neither should the book.
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