Experiments in Other Dimensions 1
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler rolls right off the tongue. A compelling title if ever I read one, it is a delightful placement of words I like to recall, playing it again and again in my mental voice box.
The title belongs to a book. This one book contains the beginnings of ten hypothetical books. It only offers these ten starts, meandering around these textual premises without promising anything more. Was there more to it than just ten beginnings? I was curious to find out. If the thing readers most look forward to is the first pages of a book because it is that first moment that pulls you into the rest of the work, this book provided ten of these opportunities.
I had discovered Italo Calvino in a prose poetry book that held some of his Invisible Cities. I read those six or eight poems over and over and developed an idea of what kind of poet Calvino must be. They were long, baroque, almost morbid descriptions of fantasy cities that must have nevertheless existed on an actual dimensional plane outside of what most of us were even aware of.
I had to own the book, and so one day, I did exactly that, and with it, I bought a companion piece titled Cosmicomics, whose blurb description enticed me by its weird and intellectual light. This other book by Calvino was a series of short stories (or more prose poems, perhaps?). Each piece purportedly started with a physical law from which it branched out. It sounded like science distorted by dream play. I fell in love with the idea, mostly because it was something I would have liked to work on myself. From the potentials of these works, Calvino was delving into fantasy, yes, but he was not going about it without being armed with the highest tools of philosophical thought.
The two books came in, but I had other things to read at the moment, and so they went into the secret place I hold my favorite poetry. And there they waited, until one day, I was looking around for books I’d like to read next, thought about these Calvino books, and rather than reading the ones I had already bought, I was curious about the ones I didn’t own. At the library, I checked out two other Calvino books that were in my wishlist as followups to the first two. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler was one of these books.
It was a “you” book which was a hard thing to pull off, since stories in the second person were inevitably tiresome. It started with you buying the Italo Calvino book, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and how you brought the book home to read. That was the first chapter. The second chapter begins the actual book you bought at the bookstore. We are at a train station where the main figure (for lack of being a character since we are not quite sure yet if he is or not) is standing around as if waiting. And it goes on from there.
As promised in the back of the book, the story stops at the end of that chapter. In the next one, we find out that the book that you were reading had a printing error. You want to take it back to the bookstore to get an intact copy if not your money back. But you find out that apparently all copies of the book had this error. This adventure leads you to meet a woman who was also reading the same book and also complaining about the same thing. You exchange numbers in the hopes of discovering what happens in the rest of the book, if one of you happens to get your hands on a good copy before the other. Your real intentions are to get to know this woman (which hints at the problem of an implied male character, even though it is a second-person perspective.)
The next chapter starts at the beginning of another book, and that gets dropped by the fifth chapter when you find out some other problem that this second book has. And so it goes. Every book has a beginning followed by an interlude that explains the new problem but that also furthers a greater story that traverses the beginnings of these ten books. It is the quest of these readers for the books they were not allowed to finish for various and sundry reasons, and it has a proper ending, though you could argue that the ending might have had nothing to do with the ten book beginnings. And regardless, the smaller narratives colored the main narrative with their different tones and conflicts.
A book like this gets annoying, and I will not deny that by the middle of it, Calvino was stretching my patience beyond what was comfortable. If this were not the same person that had written those six Invisible Cities that I so loved, I might have abandoned it.
But there was one other thing that kept me there to read on. It was Calvino’s knack for immersive style, that freewheeling manner he had with words that seemed to run right off the page, into your lap, and then all over you without granting you any mode of escape. I was enthralled not by what was happening but by how he strung sentences together that felt like they had always belonged there, as neighbors, right next to each other, a continuing cadence of ideas and images that ran on toward an ineluctable ending. And the ending came, and the damn thing still peeved because of the content, but it was one of those rare works of art, and I decided that I needed it in my life. By the time I started reading the second book I had taken out of the library, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, I bought both books without giving it another thought.
I still owned two books I had yet to read. What was my next move? Instead of reading the previous two books, as would have only been natural, I took out two more books from the library with the secret intentions of buying them if they also matched my growing expectations of Italo Calvino.