BPS Review of If on A Winter's Night a Traveller, by Italo Calvino ( Feb 2025)

BPS Review of If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino             February 2025

Are we ready for this review?! First of all the numbers : 58% of readers gave this book a score of 2/5 or lower. 32% rated it mid-way of 2.5-3.5 and a resilient 10% gave the book 4 or more out of 5.  I won’t ‘name and shame’ those who chose this book, but in their defence I would say it was one of the most engaging discussions we have had, and there was a huge benefit in being able to review and study the book together rather than try and make sense of it alone.

Huge thanks too to our loyal Italian Chiara, who provided an intelligent analysis and an explanation of why he was the respected writer he was, both in Italy and internationally. For those of you who missed the discussions and who would like to educate yourselves further, look up the literary genre of ‘Oulipo’ and post-modernism to see where Calvino fits in!

One of the strongest emotions we recorded ( and yes, there were a lot) was frustration that the book started so promisingly and yet felt just so difficult by the end. As enthusiastic readers, we recognised ourselves in the opening chapter, it felt light-hearted and promising, and as we dipped into the first of the aprocryphal stories, we were prepared to plunge into whatever new world Calvino threw us into. Patience ran thin though, after ten vastly different fragments of stories, where we looked for threads, tried to follow a plot-line and ultimately ended up feeling … a bit stupid?

Back in the comfort of bookclub and having vented our frustrations (and with Chiara’s help) we could begin to recognise some of his cleverness. In the ‘non-story’ chapters, there were prescient and insightful ruminations on publishing, on AI, on authors’ jealousies and insecurities, and on the nature of writer and reader relationships – perhaps a fascinating book for other writers to read.  The entire manuscript has a mathematical playfulness almost as a  flow-chart, should we be invested enough to work it out.  And yes, there is humour and wit. (Also some pretty dubious sexism but we’ll give him the benefit of being a 1960’s and 70’s guy.)

A ” playful post-modernist puzzle” indeed ( quoted by The Telegraph) but one which left many of us irritated.  Perhaps if we had given up diligently trying to read it (a) to a deadline and (b) to make sense of it, we might have enjoyed the puzzle a little more.