. Spinning .

This novel by Italo Calvino is easily placed among my favorite books, and I’d likely put it up there in the top ten maybe.

It is a writer’s book, a book for writers.  It is a book about readers and writers.  It is a book about writing and reading. I’d go so far as to say that this should be a college course in creative writing.  All the elements of the craft are here, both hidden within Calvino’s words and exemplified by them.  I went into the shop this morning with only four pages left to read.  I’d read a few lines, a paragraph, then put the book down.  Picking it up, I might reread what I’d just read and go a little further. My motives were obvious: I did not want the book to end.

There is skill here in the established novel form, and there is even more skill in turning it upside down and inside out.  I don’t believe that it was only because of my personal interest in hypertext that I found so much from Calvino touching well into that form too.  Maybe I didn’t quite learn very much new in writing–except for Calvino’s inimitable style and concept, but everything I’ve learned up until I’ve read this book was indeed confirmed and enhanced by Calvino’s presentation of story.  And of course, stories within story. 

I will add more of Calvino’s works to my "To Buy" list, but I wonder if any of his other pieces can possibly measure up to much less overshine If on a winter’s night a traveler.

I may have been right in my belief that the last couple of chapters were aimed more directly at the reader, as in this last chapter, Chapter 11, we get the narrator’s decision to look up all the books that make up the whole he is seeking–or rather, the wholes of each.  Once again he is thwarted in his efforts, though each title is cataloged, the books themselves for one reason or another, are unavailable.

But this occurs: a discussion amongst readers at the table where he sits as to how they read a book. Each has his own reasons, and I believe they correspond to the foregoing stories in that each serves an individual reader’s desires best.  This example is one I’ve chosen as it is most like my own:

"For me, on the other hand, it is the end that counts," a seventh says, "but the true end, final, concealed in the darkness, the goal to which the book wants to carry you.  I also seek openings in reading," he says, nodding toward the man with the bleary eyes, but my gaze digs between the words to try to discern what is outlined in the distance, in the spaces that extend beyond the words ‘the end.’ "  (p. 256)

Calvino then does what I have suspected, string the titles into a story (no big spoiler here; the titles were pretty obvious phrases and not capitalized).  And at the end, we have a decision that is so simple in theory that explains all of literature.

Back shortly with my finale review.

This is an interesting section and again, I am not all that sure I’ve caught the drift of it.  What story down there awaits its end? is first person, the narrator walking down a street of a large, crowded city, mentally erasing all that he is not interested in seeing.  This includes people, buildings, things; everything to bring it to a "smooth vertical surface, a slab of opaque glass, a partition that defines space without imposing itself on one’s sight."

Except for one person, Franziska, who is a friend he runs into on this street occasionally and who he spots in the distance.  And two men whom he did not wish to encounter who speak of a new group coming to inhabit this space and who thank him for helping to "clean it up."

Once again, I find myself pondering rather than contemplating Calvino’s words.  In the meantime, I see the imagery:

So here I am walking along this empty surface that is the world.  There is a wind grazing the ground, dragging with flurries of fine snow the last residue of the vanished world:  a bunch of ripe grapes which seems just picked from the vine, an infant’s woolen bootee, a well-oiled hinge, a page that seems torn from a novel written in Spanish, with a woman’s name:  Amaranta.  Was it a few seconds ago that everything ceased to exist, or many centuries?  I’ve already lost any sense of time.  (p. 248)

True, it does bring in a hint of the other stories, most obviously in the name of Amaranta.  But there is the emphasis here on a "sense of time."  The narrator also intends to re-establish the world at some point, bringing all back to what it was, though this is not the plan of the two men who stand between him and Franziska. 

I wonder too, if perhaps the cleansing and redefining of the world is a metaphor for that of the literary world, of words written that will be replaced by new ones, and if the narrator’s intention is to hold onto the classics.

A twist at the end, and I am thinking that this might be geared towards explaining the writer’s audience, the readers.  Could it be the way one "erases" the reality around him as he reads?  The narrator’s intention of a temporary change of world would indicate so. The friendly face and welcoming warmth of Franziska returns him to his world, where she clearly sees the city around them.

I am getting the feeling that I have lost the sense of enjoyment of this novel; the immersion of myself within its meaning. 

Chapter 10 gives up information that indeed ties the story into some semblance of plot, the Reader (still ‘you’) is sent from one screwed up government on a secret mission to another to transfer banned books between the two.  It is a viable–though silly–plot, and yet I seek more from it than a mere jolt of intrigue and condescending explanation. 

What is being told to me?  By the very fact that I want more from it, I can justify this:

"For this woman," Arkadian Porphyrich continues, seeing how intently you are drinking in his words, "reading means stripping herself of every purpose, every foregone conclusion, to be ready to catch a voice that makes itself heard when you least expect it, a voice that comes from an unknown source, from somewhere beyond the book, beyond the author, beyond the conventions of writing: from the unsaid, from what the world has not yet said of itself and does not yet have the words to say. (p. 239)

Is this it then: that nothing is being told; I am to watch and wait for something new to develop from it.  To discover from my own experience mingling with that comprehension of the layout of the words to produce a yet-unsaid story.  Is this it?

There is a new author you will be meeting.  You manage to get some of his latest, unpublished work before he is whisked away.  Everything in Calvino’s book is being whisked away, left without an ending.

Up to this point, throughout the book I have read as a writer, seeking out the meaning in Calvino’s words as if directly spoken to the author in the reader.  Metaphor’s abound, and in this vein, I have taken the majority of them to recall elements of writing and fine points of reading.  In this next section, Around an empty grave, I am not quite sure I’ve grasped its concept.

A young man’s father, on his deathbed, gives his son instructions on how to find his mother, missing since the son’s infancy. As he journeys towards the place his father indicated, he notices another traveler across the chasm who will not speak with him, and appears to want to shoot him.  Once he’s arrived in the town, he is tossed back and forth between the ‘high’ class residents and the subservient natives who resent the white man, but do remember his father.  There is some of the father in the son, and he goes after the women, not even knowing if they may be his sisters, for no one will tell him truly who is his mother.

The story is certainly an adventure, and it, like the others, is self-contained–though in all the stories we are left hanging and wanting more.  This one has more of a completed form however.  There is legend, and there is a moral of history repeating itself. 

What then, have I as a writer missed?

In this, Chapter 9, we are back to the concept of computerized novels, though it is for you, dear Reader, that they are printing out that which you seek.  Unfortunately, it gets screwed up and deleted.

Love it!

You had already realized she’s having a slightly nervous day today, Gertrude-Alfonsina; at a certain point she must have pressed the wrong key. The order of the words in the text of Calixto Bandera, preserved in the electronic memory to be brought again to light at any moment, has been erased in an instant demagnetization of the circuits.  The multicolored wires now grind out the dust of dissolved words: the the the, of of of of, from from from, that that that that, in columns according to their respective frequency.  The book has been crumbled, dissolved, can no longer be recomposed, like a sand dune blown away by the wind. (p. 220)

It is interesting that the concept of computerizing text includes the hope of survival over the relative instability of paper.  Is Calvino poking fun at new age technology?  Or is there more here; something can be said about the way he has presented the damage as columns of frequency of words that were mentioned earlier in the book as Lotaria’s time-saving method of reading.  The words Calino chooses to exemplify this process are also those that would give us no real meaning of the novel’s plot, being an article, prepositions or the multifunctional that.

Neat too, the simile of ‘a sand dune blown away by the wind’ in that it is a natural phenomenon overtaking a technological one, or in effect, disintegrating as would…well, a book.

Oh how I wish I had formed a reading group just for this one book alone!

It struck me–maybe unreasonably, maybe just very late–that there is another underlying theme to the whole of this book.  Chapter 9, and we’re back to 2nd person pov of you, the Reader, and having read much of the book Flannery handed you it is confiscated at the airport upon landing.  A nice woman whispers that she will provide you with a copy and does so, though of course it is not the same book.

It is a book you are seeing for the first time, and it does not look the least bit like a Japanese novel; it begins with a man riding across a mesa among the agaves, and he sees some predatory birds, called zopilotes, flying overhead.
"If the dust jacket’s a fake," you remark, "the text is a fake too."
"What were you expecting?" Corinna says.  Once the process of falsification is set in motion, it won’t stop.  We’re in a country where everything that can be falsified has been falsified…(p. 212)

I think of the argument of there being only 37 different plots of story–some say it can be narrowed further down into 6.  So then, is Calvino making this point throughout the book, and more emphatically here for those of us too slow to have caught on yet?

It would seem that the phrase "everything that can be falsified has been falsified" is open to the interpretation of all truth told has been told, and can only be told in new and creative ways.  Fiction, as we know, is false truth.

I laughed aloud at this one, where I feel Calvino has surely stuck this particular reader into his book as well:

At all these reflections of mine, Mr. Okeda remained silent, as he does always when I happen to talk too much and am unable finally to extricate myself from my tangled reasoning. (p. 203)

And oh yes, the ginkgo leaf falling through space and all that; well it all comes down to sex:

Though tormented by these circumstances, I managed to concentrate and subdivide the generic sensation of my sex pressed by the sex of Madame Miyagi into the compartmented sensations of the individual points of me and her, progressively subjected to pressure by my sliding movements and her convulsive contractions (p. 209)

And somehow, with a final though back to the ginko leaf analogy, the narrator has managed to both combine and separate individual sensations into the whole.

A nice analogy to hypertext:

I said I would like to distinguish the sensation of each single ginkgo leaf from the sensation of all the others, but I was wondering if it would be possible. (…) If from the ginkgo tree a single little yellow leaf falls and rests on the lawn, the sensation felt in looking at is is that of a single yellow leaf.  If two leaves descend from the tree, the eye follows the twirling of the two leaves as they move closer, then separate in the air, like two butterflies chasing each other, then glide finally to the grass, one here, one there. (p. 199)

And this:

Passing again beneath the gingko, I said to Mr. Okeda that in the contemplation of the shower of leaves the fundamental thing was not so much the perception of each of the leaves as of the distance between one leaf and another, the empty air that separated them. (p. 202)

These passages are from the section On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon. Maybe I’ve become hypertextual to a degree of heightened sensitivity in creating and separating life and all I read into a different meaning of spaces, but this image certainly calls to my mind the individual writing spaces of hypertext software such as Storyspace, and presents to me the map of separation within the whole.

Then this, on adding sound and visuals to text:

(…) I tried to make the comparison with the reading of a novel in which a very calm narrative pace, all on the same subdued note, serves to enforce some subtle and precise sensations to which the writer wishes to call the reader’s attention; but in the case of the novel you must consider that in the succession of sentences only one sensation can pass at a time, whether it be individual or general, whereas the breadth of the visual field and the auditory field allows the simultaneous recording of a much richer and more complex whole. (p. 203)

Sure sounds like "Lights! Camera! Action!" to me. Yet I find it odd that in all the time I’ve studied hypertext–though it not be all that much I suppose–I have not heard Calvino mentioned along with other pioneers of new media. 

Then again, it could just be me as I crawl out of a literary rut and myopically gaze about.

This chapter has been absolutely delightful in its revelations.  Having broken the pattern of second person (Reader) as narrator pov, it has switched to first person and that in the character of Silas Flannery, author of portions (perhaps) of this mysterious novel.  And who comes to see him, after Lotaria and Ludmilla, and after his connection with the translator Ermes Marana, but the Reader!  Appearing in this chapter (8) in the third person via the first! 

Bad enough that Flannery sends the seekers of alien life after him, but the novel he brings to show Flannery is stolen by them.  What does this mean?  But it gets even better, and here is likely a spoiler of sorts:

I have had the idea of writing a novel composed only of beginnings of novels.  The protagonist could be a Reader who is continually interrupted.  The Reader buys the new novel A by the author Z.  But it is a defective copy…(p. 197)

How glorious!

Evidently Lotaria has a very different view towards reading for context:

She explained to me that a suitably programmed computer can read a novel in a few minutes and record the list of all the words contained in the text, in order of frequency.  "That way I can have an already completed reading at hand," Lotaria says, "with an incalculable saving of time.  What is the reading of a text, in fact, except the recording of certain thematic recurrences, certain insistences of forms and meanings?  (p. 186)

Well there ya go.  All that I’ve taken the time to dig out by myself is doable by a computer in "a few minutes."  Her theory may have some value:

"Words that appear eighteen times:  boys, cap, come, dead, eat, enough, evening, French, go, handsome, new, passes, period, potatoes, those, until…

"Don’t you already have a clear idea what it’s about?"  Lotario says.  "There’s no question:  it’s a war novel, all action, brisk writing, with a certain underlying violence.

Silas Flannery doesn’t know quite how to take this revelation.  To be sure, he’s feeling a bit down already as a writer and Calvino sics this woman on him.  Then her sister, Ludmilla pays the author a visit:

"My novels give you the idea of an ordinary person?"

"No, you see…The novels of Silas Flannery are something so well characterized…it seems they were already there before, before you wrote them, in all their details…It’s as if they passed through you, using you because you know how to write, since, after all, there has to be somebody to write them…"

I feel a stab of pain.  For this girl I am nothing but an impersonal graphic energy, ready to shift from the unexpressed into writing an imaginary world that exists independently of me. (p. 190)

What better way to express the idea of story writing itself?  What better manner to show that the author is independent of the writing, no matter what amount of agony of emotion and effort go into the work?  I love the little stories that Calvino presents to display the qualities of good writing–and good reading for that matter. 

This is truly a book about and for writers at all stages of their journey.

Coincidence seems to happen more often as you get older, or maybe you are just more aware.  One of yesterday’s posts in Hypercompendia notes the change in writing style an author may undergo that makes ‘old’ writing nearly unrecognizable as one’s own. 

This morning’s reading of Calvino brings me this, from Silas Flannery’s diary:

Though I leave the house as little as possible, I have the impression that someone is disturbing my papers.  More than once I have discovered that some pages were missing from my manuscripts.  A few days afterward I would find the pages in their place again.  But often I no longer recognize my manuscripts, as if I had forgotten what I had written, or as if overnight I were so changed that I no longer recognized myself in the self of yesterday. (p. 186)

The concept–whether this is the intention of Calvino in bringing out or not–is the influence of experience from reading, writing, and just observing and living life that changes a writer’s style.  The more he partakes, the greater the change.

In the next section, I see all hell breaking loose as Lotaria brings in the idea of electronic reading.

Readerly/Writerly, Shmeaderly/Shmiterly.  Had Barthes proposed his theories in Calvino-speak, I would have embraced them more readily. My resistance was not completely due to my stubborn streak but as much, I would think, to his manner of presenting them.

Here’s Calvino:

I am sure this Lotaria (that is her name) has read them only to find in them what she was already convinced of before reading them.
I tried to say this to her.  She retorted, a bit irritated: "Why? Would ou want me to read in your books only what you’re convinced of?"
I answered her: "That isn’t it. I expect readers to read in my books something I didn’t know, but I can expect it only from those who expect to read something they didn’t know."
(Luckily I can watch with my spyglass that other woman reading and convince myself that not all readers are like this Lotaria.)
"What you want would be a passive way of reading, escapist and regressive," Lotaria said. "That’s how my sister reads.  It was watching her devour the novels of Silas Flannery one after the other without considering any problems that gave me the idea of using those books as the subject of my thesis."  (p. 185)

And yet Flannery (whose thoughts are those above) pronounces Ludmilla–not Lotaria–to be the ideal reader.  Ludmilla does not wish to know the author, she does not want to change her image of an author by compare/contrast methods of a meeting or further research.  Or so Lotaria claims.

I think the best statement here is this:  "I expect readers to read in my books something I didn’t know, but I
can expect it only from those who expect to read something they didn’t
know."  It suggests the reader input–something an author cannot possibly be aware of–based on their experience, as well as their seeking a new experience from the reading. 

Put even more simply:  The reader giveth and the reader taketh away. 

In Chapter 8 we get a closer look at the supposed author of the book(s) that our Readers seek, and that is Silas Flannery. He is a mysterious figure, and one of the most intriguing as Calvino uses him to speak directly to the writer/reader of his book.

Previously, we’d learned that Flannery was going through a slow production time in his writing, and he found himself watching a young woman through a spyglass as she read, hoping that she was indeed reading his own work.  This chapter takes it further and poses some amazing trails (there’s that damned hypertext again!):

Idea for a story.  Two writers, living in two chalets on opposite slopes of the valley, observe each other alternately.  One of them is accustomed to write in the morning, the other in the afternoon.  Mornings and afternoons, the writer who is not writing trains his spyglass on the one who is writing.

One of the two is a productive writer, the other a tormented writer.  The tormented writer watches the productive writer filling pages with uniform lines, the manuscript growing in a pile of neat pages.  In a little while, the book will be finished: certainly a best seller–the tormenter writer thinks with a certain contempt but also with envy.  He considers the productive writer no more than a clever craftsman, capable of turning our machine-made novels, catering to the taste of the public; but he cannot repress a strong feeling of envy for that man who expresses himself with such methodical self-confidence.  It is not only envy, it is also admiration, yes, sincere admiration; …(p. 172)

Shades of Danielle Steel and J.K. Rowling!  It is the author’s traditional angst; that there be a dividing line between writing for the public or writing for oneself.  And why does the damn public have such shallow expectations anyway?

And here’s the flip side:

The productive writer watches the tormented writer as the latter sits down at his desk, chews his fingernails, scratches himself, tears a page to bits, gets up and goes into the kitchen to fix himself some coffee, then some tea, then camomile, then reads a poem by Holderlin (while it is clear that Holderlin has absolutely nothing to do with what he is writing), copies a page already written and then crosses it all out line by line, (…)

(…) The productive writer has never liked the works of the tormented writer; reading them, he always feels as if he is on the verge of grasping the decisive point, but then it eludes him and he is left with a sensation of uneasiness.  But now that he is watching him write, he feels this man is struggling with something obsure, a tangle, a road to be dug leading no one knows where; at times he seems to see the other man walking on a tightrope stretched over the voice, and he is overcome with admiration.  Not only admiration, also envy; because he feels how limited his own work is, how superficial compared with what the tormented writer is seeking.  (p. 173)

Don’t you just love it? And Calvino doesn’t leave it there, with the self-doubt of every author in his own way, but he continues along this path as each author spies upon the young woman reading, each imagining giving her his own manuscript, and Holy Hypertext, Batman! — the implications and possibilities of her reaction.

Calvino intrudes too upon the mind of the reader, the simple enjoyment of reading unfettered by the demands of writing.

This is a long chapter, but one where pieces are fitting together in the story of the two readers and the odd book(s) they seek to read.

In this section, In a network of lines that intersect, I get the feeling that there is a hint of what a reader ‘writes’ into the story he is reading.  Since both readers have this particular book–going by the cover alone–the reader picks up this copy which is the Other Reader’s, and finds that the last word in the title is different from his copy: enlace versus intersect. Would that not possibly indicate that the two readers may read the same book differently?  Maybe not, but it’s a thought.

This story is different entirely (or, it’s the same!) and is about a man whose wealth and power has come from cunning and maneuvering.  He wishes therefore, to avoid the many enemies he has made and has devised a method of evading detection by multiplying the images of himself, his car, his mistress, his company sites; all but his wife. His ideal would be to use mirrors to reflect so many of his images–like a kaleidoscope.  Ultimately, this proves his undoing.

While there is an obvious metaphor in the refractions and intersections of lines and forms in the arrangement of mirrors, I can truly understand it only in its stated context of story, or else when relating to writing and literature, only to the hypertext value of it.

As in a kaleidoscope, the hypothesis I would like to record in these lines break up and diverge, just as before my eyes the map of the city became segmented when I dismantled it piece by piece to locate the crossroads where, according to my informers, the trap would be set for me, and to establish the point at which I would get ahead of my enemies so as to upset their plan in my own favor.  (p. 167)

Calvino may just be simulating narrative structure through plot points, but the simultaneity of the paths as described above would indicate a grid and design assembled atop it.  Roads; links.