If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler is a deeply metafictional work. [See first few pages here or the wikipedia entry here] At first, the narrator seems to be addressing “you” personally, as “you” begin to read the titular work, which seems to be some spy novel. However, the novel is less told, rather than the process of reading the novel is. In other words, throughout the this opening (and the many later openings of abortive, unfinished novels throughout the text), the narration is heavily reflective upon itself. (We hear such things as “the sentences suggest” etc) However, unfortunately for the Reader (who is not exactly us, especially given that I am personally female, and the Reader is male, although later there is a chapter where the second Reader, Ludmilla, is addressed), there is a problem with the book and the rest of the pages are blank, so the Reader goes back to the bookstore to find another book, where he is unfortunately interrupted again, and is unable to complete his reading. A strange tale, interrupted by various beginnings of books, ensues, in which Ludmilla (the ideal reader?), whom the Reader falls in love with, her ideologue sister Lotaria, the blocked writer Silas Flannery, who may or may not be collaborating with Ermes Marana, the spurned ex of Ludmilla, who attempts to make the enterprise of fiction reading a sham by orchestrating various conspiracies to create apocryphal, misattributed, or forged novels, weave in and out of the book. In any case, unlike many experimental novels, which are alienating, and much worse, unentertaining, this book succeeds at holding one’s attention through the interrupted narrative(s).
[Yes, this is the first extended work in which the author has used the second person present throughout the work. It works here because there's a clear justification, in addressing a reader, in a conversation between the construct of the Reader, to differentiate it from the narrated world of the books, which are generally narrated fairly conventionally. Too often I see people trying narrative tricks in works that are simply too conventional for such things to be grounded well. ]
Quotes which I liked:
“Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven’t Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn’t Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too. “
What kind of books Ludmilla likes:
“I prefer novels,” she adds, “that bring me immediately into a world where everything is precise, concrete, specific. I feel a special satisfaction in knowing that things are made in that certain fashion and not otherwise, even the most commonplace things that in real life seem indifferent to me.”
“The novel I would most like to read at this moment,” Ludmilla explains, “should have as its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life on you, simply allowing you to observe its own growth, like a tree, an entangling, as if of branches and leaves…”
“There’s a boundary line: on one side are those who make books, on the other those who read them. I want to remain one of those who read them, so I take care always to remain on my side of the line. Otherwise, the unsullied pleasure of reading ends, or at least is transformed into something else, which is not what I want. This boundary line is tentative, it tends to get erased: the world of those who deal with books professionally is more and more crowded and tends to become one with the world of readers. Of course, readers are also growing more numerous, but it would seem that those who use books to produce other books are increasing more than those who just like to read books and nothing else. I know that if I cross that boundary, even as an exception, by chance, I risk being mixed up in this advancing tide; that’s why I refuse to set foot inside a publishing house, even for a few minutes.”
“This thought of his, you, Reader, can perhaps read on his brow. For many years Cavedagna has followed books as they are made, bit by bit, he sees books be born and die every day, and yet the true books for him remain others, those of the time when for him they were like messages from other worlds. And so it is with authors: he deals with them every day, he knows their fixations, indecisions, susceptibilities, ego-centricities, and yet the true authors remain those who for him were only a name on a jacket, a word that was part of the title, authors who had the same reality as their characters, as the places mentioned in the books, who existed and didn’t exist at the same time, like those characters and those countries. The author was an invisible point from which the books came, a void traveled by ghosts, an underground tunnel that put other worlds in communication with the chicken coop of his boyhood….”
