Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler is in a class of its own. This postmodern exploration of the novel contains substantial sections written in the second person (yes, SECOND person), so that the reader themself becomes a character in a quest to find (initially) the remainder of the novel begun in the first chapter. A literary adventure thus ensues, carrying on throughout the subsequent first chapters of ten different novels, stringing said reader along a series of plot lines, deceptive (and duplicitous) characters, novels within novels (within THE novel), multiple points of view and so on. Short of complicating things further, check out the episode and then read the book. We pinky promise you won’t be sorry.
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Show Notes & Links
- If on a winter’s night a traveler
- Italo Calvino
- At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others) by Sarah Bakewell
- Italo Svevo
- Jorge Luis Borges
- “The Garden of Forking Paths”
- “A Japanese AI program just wrote a short novel, and it almost won a literary prize”
- Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983 film) – Terry Jones
- Annie Hall (1978 film) – Woody Allen
- The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
- The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata
- Billy Meier
- “Flight” by John Steinbeck
- Gore Vidal
- Joseph Conrad
- Three Days of the Condor (1975 film) – Sydney Pollack
- Italo Calvino – BBC Interview 1985
- Charlie Kaufman
