. Spinning .

This is a book, most of all, about reading I believe; and for the writer, a book about how a book is read should be of utmost value.  Know thine enemy.  Know your audience.

Back in reader mode of Chapter 3, we see another element of writing/reading as focus; that of reader experience brought to the reading which in effect changes what is read.Calvino also touches here on relevance and necessary grounding to make a reader interested in what is being read.

And he seems to mean "or Ludmilla?"  But he doesn’t finish the sentence; and to be sincere you should answer that you can no longer distinguish your interest in the Cimmerian novel from your interest in the Other Reader of that novel. (p. 51)

While this simply defines your interest in the girl, the Other Reader, now given the name Ludmilla, as you explain your purpose in coming to meet a professor who is an expert on Cimmerian literature, it does to me reflect the notion of reality/fiction bonding in areas of similarity borne of experience.  Here it becomes a bit clearer:

Now, moreover, the professor’s reactions at the name Ludmilla, coming after Irnerio’s confidences, cast mysterious flashes of light, create about the Other Reader an apprehensive curiosity not unlike that which binds you to Zwida Ozkart, in the novel whose continuation you are hunting for, and also to Madame Marne in the novel you had begun to read the day before and have temporarily put aside, and here you are in pursuit of all these shadows together, those of the imagination and those of life. (p. 51)

I’d noticed this before but there’s an instance here that illustrates how Calvino touches on so many areas within one fell swoop of his pen:

Every moment you discover there is a new character, you don’t know how many people there are in this immense kitchen of ours, it’s no use counting, there were always many of us, at Kudgiwa, always coming and going: the sum never works out properly because different names can belong to the same character, indicated according to the circumstances by baptismal name, nickname, surname or patronymic, and even by appellations such as "Jan’s widow," or "the apprentice from the corn shop."  But what counts are the physical details that the novel underlines–Bronko’s gnawed nails, the down on Brigd’s cheeks–and also the gestures, the utensils that this person or that is handling–the meat pounder, the colander for the cress, the butter curler–so that each character already receives a first definition through this action or attribute; but then we wish to learn even more, as if the butter curler already determined the character and the fate of the person who is presented in the first chapter handling a butter curler, and as if you, Reader, were already prepared, each time that character is introduced again in the course of the novel, to cry, "Ah, that’s the butter curler one!" thus obligating the author to attribute to him acts and events in keeping with that initial butter curler. (p. 35)

Wow.  This is just the cat’s meow.  In this one paragraph we have so much to learn.

"Every moment you discover there is a new character,": This tells me that until you read further, you will not know, though you are sitting in the middle of this story, who else is in the room until the author writes it in.  A fascinating concept; simple, but true.

Calvino then goes on: "the sum never works out properly because different names can belong to the same character…"  Shades of Dostoevsky and every other annoying Russian writers who loves to confuse!  Is Calvino pointing out a writing ploy?

"But what counts are the physical details that the novel underlines–(…)and also the gestures, the utensils…"  I believe Calvino is doing several things here.  He is focusing the reader on this portion of the story, perhaps hinting that he go back and look for a ‘butter-curler’ or some such thing that shall prove to be important to the story.  He is also telling us that this is what he is doing; and in doing so, is bringing the author into the storyworld where he and you are the reality figures living in the same space as these fictional characters of the novel. 

And third, he’s giving us a nice lesson in how to write: "Ah, that’s the butter-curler one!" thus obligating the author to attribute to him acts and events in keeping with that initial butter-curler.

Good God,how did the man think of all this?

Chapter 2 (!) brings us back into the reading mode of the book, that is, the narrator addressing us as ‘you’ and telling us how to go about returning Calvino’s book because it appears to be a printer’s error in how it’s put together.

The bookseller maintains his composure. "Ah, you, too?  I’ve had several complaints already.  And only this morning I received a form letter from the publisher.  You see?  ‘In the distribution of the latest works on our list a part of the edition of the volume If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino has proved defective and must be withdrawn from circulation.’ (p. 28)

Whereby the bookseller points to a young woman who has just returned the book.  This gives ‘you’ opportunity to meet her:

And so the Other Reader makes her happy entrance into your field of vision; or, rather, into the field of your attention; or, rather, you have entered a magnetic field from whose attraction you cannot escape. (p. 29)

And here’s the sticky wicket with second person pov: it may not suit you as reader to become the ‘you’ of Calvino’s (or anybody else’s–I wrote a second person pov short story once that involved the reader’s appraisal of ‘her’ own naked body) image of you as reader.

Obviously, this Other Reader holds a certain attraction to ‘you’ as more than a fellow literature enthusiast; ‘you’ think she’s hot.  Huh?

Well just as Roland Barthes has taught me that reader changes story, story changes reader is often a more readily accepted fact of life.  So there should be no problem for me here.  I tend to think more like a man than a woman (stereotyping, I know, but there are biological differences and proof that cognitive forces are influenced by gender–and I’m not saying "smarter"; I’m saying "different") in many ways.  It’s just that picking up a girl has never been one of them.

I know what the term means in the reality/fiction barrier between narrative and reader, and when it is breached to bring the reader into the story.  This Calvino does to a degree, not by inviting the reader completely into the environment, but by reaching out in what might be considered an "aside" in stage terms (I believe) to form a connection that passes information between narrator and reader in a much more intimate manner than a mere recollection of events.

The breaking of the barrier is done by the character within the story–but he usually does not go beyond the storyworld in invitation.  Calvino has his character disengage himself from the storyworld at least to have one foot in, one foot out and firmly planted by the reader’s side as he is turning pages.  The character appears to read along with the reader. 

In this portion, the narrator admits that all he knows is in effect what we know: he is in a strange train station at night, is carrying baggage that he expects to exchange with someone who is supposed to meet him and utter a code sentence.  This is the stuff of intrigue and yet it is examined in a way that the reader normally needs to do all by himself.  The conflict then is there and building as we follow him in his worries of having missed his accomplice.  Calvino then neatly introduces the background flavor at the station bar, including a couple of the characters and the narrator’s interaction, and voila! it all comes back to plot and story and he is met and hurried out of there aboard the next train out.

It was exciting in a way that overexplanation should have tainted it but didn’t.  For all I knew, as reader, and confidante of the narrator, the person he was anxious to be meeting may well have been me!

Never has an author or a book–at least any that I have read–involved my full attention quite so much not out of difficulty but rather out of an intimacy Calvino forms with the reader who is willing to accept his lead.

You, reader, believed that there, on the platform, my gaze was glued to the hands of the round clock of an old station, hands pierced like halberds, in the vain attempt to turn them back, to move backward over the cemetery of spent hours, lying lifeless in their circular pantheon.  But who can say that the clock’s numbers aren’t peeping from rectangular windows, where I see every minute fall on me with a click like the blade of a guillotine?  However, the result would not change much: even advancing in a pokished, sliding world, my hand contracted on the light rudder of the wheeled suitcase would still express an inner refusal, as if that carefree luggage represented for me an unwelcome and exhausting burden. (p. 13)

In lieu of a defined visual of the train station, Calvino offers some suggestions that we might imagine in one time period or another; hanging the trappings a bit and as he notes, the outcome remaining the same.

He plays with space obviously; but time–symbolized by the clock that we are not to take literally–is manipulated as well.  Time as measure is described in its physical form.  In other words, as I see it, an old fashioned wall hung stainless steel clock, with hands moving the minutes and hours will indicate a time further back in space that will match an old train station–though again, perhaps in its own newness of state of being.  A digital indicator of time will call up a different image of the train station, the traveler himself. 

No, we don’t get into the author’s head here–and never should we; but the narrator’s is open to us as is the case in first person point of view.  But here’s the twist: he has entered our’s–the readers’–as well.

Love it!

I’d read Chapter 1 of this about a month ago when I thought I couldn’t make it through Miller’s Topic of Cancer.  I put it aside when my stubborn nature wouldn’t let me give up on Miller. Tonight I read Chapter 1 again.

This is definitely going to be an interesting journey since these first pages tell the reader–in second person pov–exactly how to prepare to read this book ‘you’ have just bought.  There is an intimacy in third person, because it assumes it knows the reader well–and that’s every reader!  Some people just don’t take to second person.  For one thing, it must suit to a certain degree, even if fantasy where it must be a desirable fantasy.  Anything the character ‘you’ does, must feel comfortable in the reader’s mind to slip into the role.

Oddly, to me, first person makes me just as uncomfortable for the same reason.  While the first person is taken to be someone other than the reader, as we are used to reading a letter from someone else written as ‘I’, if read aloud, I as the speaker become the I of the story and that’s an intimate position similar to the ‘you’ of third.  Again, reading ‘you’ changes with perspective.

But Italo Calvino has more up his sleeve than the I/you pov; by the next chapter he puts us into third.

I’d started Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, cheating with a tempting tidbit to force myself through Miller’s Tropic of Cancer which is truly a trial of the sophisticated mind.  A more allowable (by the rules) side trip through BASS 2007 along with class-related required reading provided excuse to legally wander but now I find myself once again facing the inevitable.  Calvino or Miller?  Calvino, of course, but only with a required Catholic penance of one or two more days spent with Miller alone.

Should also be reading other stuff-though I’ve started John Porcellino’s Perfect Example and quite honestly feel exactly as I do about Miller’s novel.  Thank the literary and social gods for progress in acceptance of formerly considered ‘dirty words’.  Maybe fuck and shit will soon go out of style and the adolescent fascination with formerly foul language will follow.