"If on a winter's night a traveller" by Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino has been one of my favorite writers for some time. This book is clearly the epitome of meta-fictional narrative. There is one main technique similar to Kafka and Ishiguro: the multiplicity of stories. Except that in Calvino’s book there is a central thread, She-Reader and He-Reader relationship and their quest to uncover the mystery of truncated books. This is of course a mask, what Calvino is addressing is the relationship writer-text-reader. The supporting, side stories Calvino uses to make different points about the art of writing fiction. The variegated voices, styles, settings, and themes are just the backdrop to what is beyond fiction (hence, metafiction); in other words no matter what each story is “about”, the point is that this book is about writing fiction, how readers co-create in their minds the realities a writer tries to convey, this is a story about writing and reading stories. True there are powerful governments (portrayed as stupid even comical), that resemble Kafka’s omnipresent government, but the real intangible power is the structure of metafiction itself and the strong bond writer-reader via text.

There is also one main difference: no dreamlike landscapes, unless we take the central story column as a dream and the many frame stories as dreams within dreams. Where Ishiguro presents us with a fractal field of stories in one plotless narrative, Calvino presents us with many insinuated plots supporting one central story, which at times is irrelevant (crazy plot) yet it is the place where the act of writing is really analyzed. If Ishiguro works on the surreal, Calvino works on the unreal. If Ishiguro works in the realm of non-fiction, Calvino does so in the realm of metafiction.

Where is Kafka here? Kafka did not finish his novels. Calvino does not finish his plots, he is just playing with us, showing how he can mimic many styles and voices.
My favorite narrative is “On the Carpet of Leaves…”, for the richness of detail, the intensity of language, and the sensuality of theme. It is chapter eleven (p. 258) what reveals the fundamental thing of the book: the titles of the many stories form a paragraph that could be yet another story. And this is the virtual fractal: allegedly we can take any paragraph of any story and divide each sentence into the title and the beginning of another, brand new story, and that one into more stories, and that one into more, ad infinitum, like Zeno’s Arrow, never reaching our destination, the end of the story. Story telling never ends. Forget the one thousand and one nights. Calvino’s work forces us to peek into an infinite mirror, a book of sand, ever shrinking and at the same time expanding, universes and realities of fiction.