If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

It took me some time to make up my mind about the book, but I think that now I have. The book itself is often depicted as quite complex, but the structure is actually quite clear: On the one hand you have a story told in the second person addressing (mostly) a virtual Reader who is the actual main character of the book, who starts reading a novel, realizes there is a flaw in the print of his book and tries to find the rest of it. During his search, however, he keeps finding the beginning of other stories, never the one he was looking for. On the other hand, you have the beginning of each of the books the Reader has found, different genera being represented. The chapters alternate between the main storyline and each of the stories supposed to have been found. The main thread of the book is the Reader’s story, which I guess, is supposed to be a reflection on the act of reading. - There is the meta part of it (you’re reading about someone who reads etc). I’m personally not interested in meta-stories or references to stuff, I tend to find them quite boring, I’d rather read something new than a commentary, unless it is really blowing your mind. - Then you have the actual Reader’s storyline that becomes more and more far-fetched by the page, with a quite terrible and absolutely unnecessary love story. - The Reader meets characters with different attitudes towards reading. Those (and all) characters are disembodied, as they only serve the theoretical purpose of illustrating particular attitudes. It would be fine if this was some kind of teaching device but it’s neither educational nor really theoretical. So, basically, to me, it read as a rambling on reading. This “theoretic” part of the book, the one that is supposed to make you think, didn’t really make me think. I just found that it was a lot of antics and rambling. That's actually my main objection towards the book: the author made up a very sophisticated structure but it seems to me like he didn't have a particular story or idea to get through, making the whole effort pointless. I liked the part with the revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, though. It might be a bit stereotypical and/or racist, but I found it funny. Then you have the stories embedded in the long story. In all reviews I’ve seen, they are described as “beginnings of potential novels” because that’s exactly what they are called in the book itself. Nevertheless, they read more like short stories. What’s the difference? In a traditional novel, after the setup, you have a triggering event that engages you so you want to know what's happening next. Here, the triggering event acts as a twist at the end of each short story. In fact, the end of the short story was enough for me, I didn’t want to know how the story would continue, which would be a failure if these were really beginnings of books. Thus, I'd say that the extremely artificial device of “let’s put together the beginning of 10 novels” fails: this is just a compilation of short stories embedded into a longer narrative, which isn't new. What about the short stories themselves? Like in any compilation of short stories, it depends on the stories and the (real) reader, I guess. I didn’t love them, I didn’t hate them either. They were fine but didn’t blow my mind. They made me think of Borges, what is not a compliment coming from me because Borges bores me a lot and I just want his stories to end fast. I think that the main problem may be that these feel like pastiches of original stories. That's probably what the author intended but I don’t mind for pastiches, I want the author to take it seriously and provide me with the real thing… In summary: it’s not an easy book to establish an opinion about. It probably started as a radical idea but didn’t follow through-not for me, anyway. The theoretical part didn’t convince me and the narrative part was fine, not extraordinary. It remains quite accessible and I'm actually happy I have read it, yet I wouldn’t recommend it as a casual read.

Originally read: 12/24/2022