When a traveler on a winter night

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When a traveler in a winter night (Italian: Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore ) is a novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino from 1979 (German 1983 , translated by Burkhart Kroeber ).

content

“You are preparing to read the new novel When a Traveler by Italo Calvino on a winter night . Just relax. Collect yourself. Put any other thought aside. ”This is how Calvino begins this novel, which is as original as it is confusing, the main character of which is the reader addressed with“ you ”. Not in the third or first person, but consistently in the you-form, it is described how the reader buys the book in a large bookstore, carries it home, unpacks it expectantly, opens it, skims the blurb and finally, after he has found the most comfortable one Has found the reading position and has obtained the necessary calm ("Better close the door, the television is always on over there"), begins to read. And he reads: "The novel begins at a train station, a locomotive hisses, piston steam hisses over the beginning of the chapter, smoke covers part of the first paragraph." So begins the first chapter, and as the clouds of smoke and mist slowly dissipate, From hints and brief scenes, an increasingly exciting story develops, which is obviously about secret agents and a suitcase swap. But when it gets most exciting, the story breaks off.

The frustrated reader has to find out that his copy is defective, it only consists of the first 16 pages that are repeated over and over again, a binding error! The next day, indignant, he rushed to the bookstore, where he was told that he was not the first to complain, that part of the edition of Calvino's Traveler was unfortunately defective, and that the binding company had mistaken the printed sheets of this novel with those of another New release, the Polish novel Vor dem Weichbild von Malbork by Tazio Bazakbal mixed up. The reader pauses and ponders: "So the one you began to read with so much sympathy was not from Calvino at all, but from a Pole ..." He dispenses with a correct Calvino and instead has the Bazakbal. "As you wish," says the bookseller, "a customer was just here who had the same problem and also wanted to swap places with the Pole." He points to a young lady who is still standing in front of a shelf in the shop. Big, lively eyes, good, well-pigmented complexion, richly wavy, fragrant hair. So now, reader, happily the reader enters your field of vision… “The reader starts a conversation with her, they exchange their telephone numbers to talk about the continuation of the novel. The reader hurries home elated to start reading. "And right on the first page you will discover that the novel you have in your hands has nothing to do with yesterday's."

So it goes on, through a total of ten beginnings of the novel. Every time a completely new story begins, which captivates the reader, but for various reasons it always breaks off at the most exciting point, so that the reader is more and more hectic in search of the right sequel. At the same time, he gets closer and closer to the (fellow) reader, because although Ludmilla, as her name is (the reader remains a nameless “you”), has completely different reading preferences, they are now looking for the right book together - and of course they will soon be one Lovers. Their search takes them far around the world, they meet all sorts of strange people who are always involved with books and reading - lecturer , literature professor with ditto students, bestselling author with a writing crisis, most strangely a translator who is also agent, schemer and forger and apparently caused the whole mess, even if, as it turns out at the end, “all out of love for a woman”, namely Ludmilla, the reader. The events roll over, the plot takes on the traits of a spy thriller, the settings are Paris, New York, Arabia, the African bush, the Indian Ocean, an alpine valley in Switzerland, a military dictatorship in South America and finally the office of the chief censor of an obscure one North- Eastern European People's Republic , which turns out to be the “most subtle intellectual” of his country and comes out as a true reading freak: “I too immerse myself in reading evening after evening, sinking into it ...”

At the end of the adventurous search for the right book that is always different, the reader and reader are well married. The short final chapter reads: “Reader, now you are husband and wife. A large marriage bed receives your parallel readings. Ludmilla closes her book, turns off her light, lays her head on the pillow, says: 'You turn off too. Aren't you tired of reading? ' And you: 'Just a moment. I'm just finishing When a traveler on a winter night from Italo Calvino. '"

style

Stylistically, each of the ten beginnings of the novel, each 10–15 pages long embedded in this framework, represents a parody or rather an homage to a certain spelling or group of authors of the 20th century - from the Nouveau Roman à la Robbe-Grillet to the Russian revolutionary novel , from Kafka and Borges to the Parisian crime thriller , from the American campus novel to the psychological thriller , from the Japanese erotic novel à la Kawabata to the Latin American magical realism and the symbolism of Andrej Bely .

Seen in this way, the ten beginnings of the novel form a kind of cross-section through modern literature without being clearly assigned to a particular style or genre in each case. The entire novel has therefore also been referred to as a " metaroman ": a novel about the pleasure of reading and the love of books, which is itself noticeably permeated by this pleasure and love. As a reader, of course, you have to be able to endure being systematically and lustfully frustrated by the stories that break off at the most exciting point every time. If you can't do that, you put the book down annoyed.

In this novel, Calvino relies heavily on the literary theories of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco , who in the 1960s and 1970s emphasized the role of the reader as co-creator of reading. In When a Traveler on a Winter Night , the reader is even introduced as the protagonist of the narrative.

Voices of criticism

“Into pleasure!” Wrote the critic W. Martin Lüdke in his review of the book in Spiegel No. 44, 1983. “Here all expectations are met, albeit with a slight delay. It's all around here, with no ifs or buts. A real novel, or, to be honest, eleven of them. One story follows another and it just keeps getting more exciting. This is something to browse through. Nothing against Eco, it just reads like the telephone book of Milan, lots of staff, hardly any action. Things are happening here in quick succession. "

Similarly, the critic Gerhard Stadelmaier in Die Zeit , No. 42, 1983: “... the most amusing, touching reading chase for a long time, a pleasure, prepared very easily and without sweat, but the most complicated breaking and nesting of the doll-in-the-doll glossy transparent. It's easy to write, so fluttering and meaningful, so apparently only at stake, hiding and drawing, so constantly looking for pleasure in the center of that labyrinth in which all the threads are then completely inextricably tangled that neither the reader in the book even the reader of the reader in the book really feels it when under his eyes a large, monstrous pamphlet against the written, a maddened treatise for the literature read assumes the most refined forms. "

And Wolfram Schütte in the Frankfurter Rundschau , Christmas 1983: “Italo Calvino's novel - and it's like a novel - can therefore be read by both literary-historical and scientific connoisseurs and bookworms with the same (if not the same) enjoyment because the author plays through all sorts of subtleties (if not all of them) of the romance theory and reader history, but the "naive" reader, who of course is not that naive, sees himself addressed and challenged at the same time with all his behaviors, demands, desires and feels. "

In contrast, Armin Ayren in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of September 3, 1983: “Calvino's ideas are original, sometimes almost ingenious, but the author runs the risk of over-stressing them and thereby at least depriving them of some of their effect. The slowly tiresome reader understands that the fantastic barriers against the sequence, as probably against any overly fashionable building principle. It is no coincidence that Borges never wrote a novel. "

Jörg Drews judges even more negatively in Bookmarks , Issue 7, Nov. 1983: “You can only report the progress of the construction of the whole in somewhat detailed and exciting manner as long as the book itself remains exciting. And that is no longer it after the third chapter at the latest, or only in places, the content becomes irrelevant, the construction only too clear. [...] The catch here, too, is that what is given to the book in terms of thoughts, reflections, meanings or suggested to the reader is quickly obvious and can be read without resistance. "

expenditure

  • Italo Calvino: Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. Einaudi, Turin 1979; Reprint Mondadori, Milan 1995, ISBN 88-04-39029-8 .
  • Italo Calvino: When a traveler on a winter night. Translated by Burkhart Kroeber. Hanser, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-446-13300-3 .

literature

  • Werner Helmich, reading adventure. To thematize the reading in Calvino's novel “Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore” . In: Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus / Helmut Meter (ed.), Aspects of storytelling in modern Italian literature. Tübingen 1983, pp. 227-248.
  • Heike Maybach, the narrated reader. Studies on the role of the reader in Italo Calvino's novel "When a traveler on a winter night". Materialis Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 1988, ISBN 3-88535-129-3 .
  • Gerhard Regn, reading as a story. Tel Quel and the functionalization of literary theory in Italo Calvino's “Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore”. In: Romanistisches Jahrbuch 34 (1983), pp. 153–168.
  • Andreas Kablitz, Calvino's “Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore” and the problematization of the auto-referential discourse. In: Klaus W. Hempfer (ed.), Poststructuralism, Deconstruction, Postmodernism. Stuttgart 1992, pp. 75-94.
  • Eberhard Leube, Ermes Marana and his fathers. On the origin and meaning of the ›forger‹ in Calvino's “Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore”. In: Andreas Kablitz / Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus (eds.), Literary-historical encounters. Tübingen 1993, pp. 213-223.
  • Sara Gesuata, What's the Reader of a Second-Person Narrative Expected to do? Discourse Structure and Point of View in Italo Calvino's “If on a Winter's Tale a Traveler”. In: Language and Literature 22 (1997), pp. 63-91.
  • Antonella Calzolai, “Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore”: Romanzo della forme. In: Gradiva 18 (2000), pp. 51-55.
  • Peter V. Zima, On the institutionalization of the reader role at Italo Calvino: “Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore”. In: RZLG 28 (2004) 1–2, pp. 163–183.
  • Anne-Marie Montluçon, Entre théorie et fiction. Quelques figures paradoxales de l'Auteur in "Si par une nuit d'hiver un voyageur" ​​d'Italo Calvino. In: Recherches et Travaux 64 (2004), pp. 141–156.
  • Pascal Gabellone, Ricerca del modello e tentazione dei possibili nella narrativa calviniana. In: Narrativa 27 (2005), pp. 97-105.
  • Günter Berger, The Roman in Romania. New tendencies after 1945. Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen 2005, ISBN 3-8233-6147-3 .
  • Jörn Steigerwald, Hermes Configurations: Mediation of Postmodernist Writing in Calvino's “Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore” and Nadolny's “A God of Cheekiness”. In: Kultur-Poetik 8.2 (2008), pp. 187-202.

Others

  • In 2004 Wenn a Traveler became a book for the city on a winter night in Cologne .
  • In 2009, the British newspaper The Telegraph included the English edition If On A Winter's Night A Traveler in the list of 100 books that everyone should read and characterized it as a “fun post-modern puzzle”.
  • Also in 2009 the rock musician Sting named his new album If On A Winter's Night ... after the book by Calvino.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Renate Müller-Buck: Calvino, Italo - Se una notte d'inverno un viaggatore. In: Munzinger Online / Kindlers Literatur Lexikon in 18 volumes, 3rd, completely revised edition 2009, accessed on October 16, 2017.
  2. ↑ Album: Sting, If on a Winter's Night… The Independent , October 30, 2009 (English).