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If on a winter’s night a traveler
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in If on a winter’s night a traveler, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Act of Reading
Academia and Publishing
Censorship and Government Oppression
Love, Lust, and Anxiety
Summary
Analysis
The narrator says that you must have noticed a passage in the book that’s familiar. But as you keep reading, the narrator explains, you’ll realize it’s just a printing error and that a page has been repeated. You slowly realize that the rest of the book you’re holding is just the same 16 pages repeated over and over. You consider throwing the book out the window but decide instead to take it back to the bookseller.
Once again, the novel breaks the flow of time, suggesting that rather than moving forward, the narrator of the previous chapter is doomed to keep repeating the same events over and over. This helps to highlight how even books without printing errors might suggest the possibility of a wider world but are always doomed to feature the same characters repeating the same events again and again. The frustration of the “you” the narrator addresses is more intense because of the printing error. In a broader sense, though, the person the narrator addresses is also upset about realizing that books as a medium have limitations.
Themes
The bookseller says he has already gotten several complaints like the one you are making. The bookseller got a letter from the publisher claiming that due to a printing error, some copies of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler have gotten mixed together with Outside the town of Malbork by the Polish novelist Tazio Bazakbhal.
Tazio Bazakbhal is fictional, like all the writers (aside from Calvino) who are credited as authors of these stories within the story. In the real world, Calvino is writing for Bazakbhal, so the presence of multiple authors in the book shows how a single person contains different sides and can take on different personas.
Themes
Upon hearing this, you (the Reader) decide you’d rather read the Polish novel than Calvino’s. The bookseller says that’s fine. In fact, a young lady just asked to do the same thing. But the bookseller says he can’t promise the Bazakbhal books are correct either. As you go over to find the book, you notice that the young lady, the Other Reader, is very attractive.
The audience’s attraction to the Other Reader suggests that as much as reading might seem like a solitary activity, it is ultimately something that can draw people together. In the real world, readers may feel a sense of community with other distant readers just by knowing that others have experienced the same book, and this passage imagines what a tangible variation on that relationship between readers might look like.
Themes
You and the Other Reader talk about enjoying Bazakbhal. You talk about novels in general. You laugh at the possibility that maybe the Bazakbhal book you’re about to buy will actually contain Calvino’s book. In case that happens, you and the Other Reader exchange phone numbers. You are happy at the prospect of no longer being a solitary Reader. But as you excitedly begin your new book, you soon realize it’s not a continuation of what you were reading before.
Calvino explores how an author’s persona can affect the reading experience, even including himself as a character in the novel, and this passage further explores that idea. The “you” the narrator addresses and Other Reader might not have ever discovered the “Bazakbhal” novel if it had had the correct name on it, but because it was incorrectly labeled as Calvino, they discovered an author they like even better than Calvino. One of the reasons why “you” and the Other Reader are more sympathetic (while still flawed) characters in the novel is because they are the characters open to new experiences.
Themes
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