I
A
book about reading, even how to read in a variety of ways, that is. A book that
is a pleasure, that speaks itself of the pleasure being released, just as a
lover would. But is there any lasting satisfaction? We are led on through
never-ending teases to stories that speak not of fulfilment, but of
humiliation, revenge, anti-climax, threat, mistaken identity – anything that
can go seriously wrong in a relationship. Calvino’s stories offset the hope
that we can have an affair with this book and get away with it. Do not believe
that we have here some short stories yoked together by the author’s imaginative
diversions about reading. Each story is telling you very sharply what the ideal
dream reader would not wish to know, that promise is temporary, that a story
does not speak of survival and death, that the book is what you are caught
inside now and from which (to which) you will always be referring to something
else.
II
What
sort of a person writes such a book?
This
is the story of you reading this book. Or, at least, the story of the ‘you’
reading this book. You follow yourself through the excitement and the setbacks
of the story Calvino is telling. It’s like Snakes and Ladders, stories that
come abruptly to an end, leaving you where you had not expected to be: stories
and twists of the narrative that open up new ideas about storytelling itself
and the act of reading itself, which you take so much for granted.
What
is tells you, amongst other things, is that all of your reading is a story in
itself, your story of yourself reading. Instead of the normal distance between
the reader and the text, the drama of this novel excites one to the realisation
that our very existence is tied up intimately with the arrangement of words and
actions in a novel.
Calvino
plays havoc with the ‘You’. Instead of putting the reader in the passive
position of enjoying the different experiences of characters, he makes the
reader the central character, sometimes placing them in highly embarrassing,
stressful situations. This action of Calvino’s in the novel leaves one
wondering if he does not, in his own mind, want in this book to get back at the
reader – not just to involve them but to, in fact, put them under fire.
Here
is a work that comes in reverse order of creation. We think. Normally a book
will have its own basis at least an item of an idea. And so too does this. But
we usually expect the story first and theory later. Here we have a book that
starts as theories and is then illustrated by stories, so much so that we read
the stories in order to uncover the theories behind them. The stories, even the
main story of the Reader (You) and the Other (Ludmilla), are secondary to
Calvino’s purpose. They do little more than dramatise the mind game he is at
work on.
Another
achievement is Calvino’s expert descriptions of the reading process – how we
choose books, what it is that succeeds in leading us on, how we get tired of a
story, or leave it for a while.
This
book makes us aware, as critical guides cannot, of our reading habits, of what
it is we are doing when we end. And what Calvino is telling us is that our
reading is not innocent – if we identify or at least appreciate in part the
position of the You in this book, then we are not innocent in what it is we are
looking for – entertainment, edification, diversion, titillation, escape,
learning – and that all of these things are very often not at the surface when
we choose what we read, and that we can go away perfectly aware of what the
book has said but perfectly unaware of our own truest motives in reading it and
responses to the work itself.
The
stories and the connections are all concerned with relationship: between writer
and reader, writer and his other, writer and his rival writer (imagined or
real), reader and other reader. He brings out very well in these stories the
passion of these activities and the jealousies and rivalries that can happen,
almost as an inevitability of love for the story.
Could
it be suggested that what is lacking here is the experience? This is the
product of a story-teller’s thoughts about the act of creation and his
relationship with the reader. This removal from the lived experience is one
thing I do not like – an artificiality about the whole work which has to do
with the nature of the enterprise itself.
Entries
in Notebooks, 10-14th December 1989
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