If on a winter’s night a traveler Summary

The narrator informs you, the Reader, that you’re about to read If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino, so you should get ready and find a comfortable position. He warns you that Calvino has a reputation for changing his style from book to book, but he reassures you that you should still be able to understand and perhaps even enjoy his new book.

You begin to read If on a winter’s night a traveler, which involves a mysterious narrator with a suitcase. The narrator seems to be a spy or a criminal, since he is at a remote train station trying to secretly swap his suitcase with someone else’s and is afraid of being caught. But just as you’re at a suspenseful moment in the story, it cuts off due to a printing error, and so you go find the bookseller to see what the problem is.

While at the bookstore to return your book, you meet an attractive young woman named Ludmilla, the Other Reader, who also has a defective copy of the book. The bookseller offers you a Polish novel that he claims will continue the story you’re in the middle of reading. You decide to swap phone numbers will Ludmilla in case either of you has any more problems with the book.

As it turns out, the next story you read, Outside the town of Malbork, doesn’t have anything to do with the first one. It involves a young narrator who is apprehensive about leaving the farming family he lives with because Ponko, the son of a nearby family, has to leave home to save himself from a blood feud his family has with a rival family. This story also ends abruptly.

Frustrated again, you call Ludmilla to see if she’s having a similar experience. Instead, Ludmilla’s sister Lotaria answers the phone. You’re disappointed, but then Ludmilla finally answers the phone herself. You and Ludmilla go to a university to find Professor Uzzi Tuzii and hopefully hear the rest of the story.

Uzzi Tuzii begins telling a story translated from the dead language of Cimmerian that’s called Leaning from the steep slope. It contains the diary entries of a narrator who, due to his fascination with the beautiful and mysterious Miss Zwida, seems to accidentally get himself involved in a scheme to break someone out of prison. Eventually, Professor Uzzi Tuzii gets so distracted with explaining the story that you can no longer follow what’s happening.

Still at the university, you and Ludmilla go to a seminar on feminism where Lotaria is studying with Professor Galligani, a rival of Uzzi Tuzii’s. Lotaria reads you a new story called Without fear of wind or vertigo. It involves a narrator in a city that is preparing to be attacked during a period of revolution. At the very end of the story, the narrator realizes that his good friend, Valerian, is secretly holding a death warrant with the narrator’s name on it. At that point, Lotaria stops the story and says everyone in the class should have enough to discuss for the next month.

You decide to go straight to the publishing house to see learn more about the issue, and there you meet Mr. Cavedagna, a small man who seems to be the person the company sends out to fix problems. From him, you learn about the mysterious translator Ermes Marana who deliberately makes counterfeit translations of books that don’t resemble the originals at all. Mr. Cavedagna gives you some photocopied pages of a story called Looks down in the gathering shadow to read. You start it and see that it is a story about a narrator who is trying to dispose of the body of a man named Jojo, only to be seemingly betrayed by his accomplice Bernadette at the last minute.

You run out of pages in that book, so you go to a café to meet Ludmilla. She’s late, so you start on a new book you picked up at the publisher called In a network of lines that enlace. It involves a narrator who seems to hear ringing telephones whenever he’s out running. One day, he answers a strange telephone and becomes involved in the kidnapping plot of his student Marjorie.

Eventually, you can’t read any more because you’ve become impatient waiting for Ludmilla. She calls you and invites you to her house, but when you arrive, she doesn’t seem to be there. You explore the house and learn more about Ludmilla. Eventually she returns, and you talk more about reading. When you leave her again, you take a copy of the book that you think is identical to the one you were just reading, but in fact the title is subtly different: In a network of lines that intersect. This story involves a rich, paranoid narrator who collects kaleidoscopes and fakes his own kidnappings for his protection, only to end up accidentally trapped in a room full of mirrors.

Later, the pulp novelist Silas Flannery records some thoughts in his diary in which you, the Reader, appear as a minor figure. People believe that aliens are communicating with him to guide his next novel, but Flannery himself remains skeptical, even though he has been experiencing strange memory-loss issues recently. Flannery seems to have an almost supernatural power to control the world he lives in, so he sends the Reader away to go read a book called On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon in order to give Flannery himself a chance to see Ludmilla alone. The new book involves a young man in Japan who is interested in a young woman named Makiko but who ends up getting caught having sex with Makiko’s mother, Madam Miyagi.

The focus shifts back to you, the Reader. Before you can read any more of the Japanese story, you land in the country of Ataguitania (in search of Marana), and the authorities confiscate the book because it’s banned. You soon meet a woman named Corinna, who reminds you a lot of Lotaria and who claims to have a copy of the book that she can lend you. You get thrown in prison. Corinna seems to be an authority figure there, and she tries to reassure you. Corinna confuses you, since she goes by many other names and seems to have so many jobs, but she also intrigues you, and at one point, the two of you begin having sex. When the two of you are interrupted, you start doing what you were originally supposed to do: reading a story on the computer for a prison experiment.

The story is called Around an empty grave, and it involves a narrator named Nacho’s quest to find his real mother after the death of his father, the well-known womanizer Don Anastasio Zamora. Eventually, you have to stop reading because the Ataguitanian police are sending you to do a secret mission in the rival country of Ircania. You learn that despite having very different politics, Ircania also believes in censorship. You try to prevent the confiscation of a book by an author called Anatoly Anatolin, but when you arrange a meeting with Anatolin, he only manages to sneak you a few pages before cops rush out and arrest him.

Anatolin’s book is called What story down there awaits its end? and is about a narrator who seemingly has the power to make parts of the world disappear. You stop in the middle to try to put in requests at a library for all the previous books you haven’t finished, but your efforts are unsuccessful. You and seven other readers talk about reading, and one of them happens to mention that ancient stories only end in two ways: with the death of a hero and heroine or with their marriage. Hearing this, you immediately decide to marry Ludmilla. Later, while married, the two of you lie in bed as you begin to finish reading If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino.