If On A Winter's Night A Traveller...
(Italo Calvino)
Few people are aware that the versatile and multifaceted style of Salman Rushdie was influenced heavily by Italo Calvino. "If on a winter's night a traveller" is Calvino's final work and there are fans who see it as his best work - the type of writer who just keeps getting better with each new book he writes.
The book unfolds as an 'interactive' adventure with YOU the reader involved at the outset - the narrator describes how you go along to a book shop and buy this Calvino book you are reading. It rapidly turns out that it was mis-printed and you have to go back to the bookshop. There a female reader is also having the same problem and this serves as a starting point both for your relationship with the second reader (and indeed her sisters, boyfriends and everything that comes with them) - as well as the starting point for your adventure with the book.
Together you and the female reader follow a series of different adventures - different stories which all have in common only a few trivial surface details - otherwise they are all totally different, a sort of eclectic novel in which each chapter enacts a radical new departure from the previous one. Gradually the trail of different stories starts to seek an omega point in which its author, Silas Flannery, as well as a band of international literature-fraudsters circle the reader, get ready to finish off your adventure for you - by now, of course, you've given up on Italo Calvino whose book it allegedly never was (within the fiction, you understand) and become increasingly fascinated with this strange almost mythical author who seems to have writer's block and is spending his days watching a woman on the beach.
Where does it all end? Well that's not entirely up to you - although to get there you do have to finish reading the book - a recommended feat, since you DO get what you want when you get there.
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