. 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.