Ingenious

Mail on Sunday

Breathtakingly inventive

The greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century

Guardian

See all

Reading Calvino, you're constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before.This is highly unnerving: fortunately you're usually too busy laughing to go mad... I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends

A devastating, wonderfully ingenious parody of all those dreary best-sellers you buy at the airport... It is a "world novel": take it with you next time you plan to travel in an armchair

Observer

A brilliant work of the imagination and the intellect working in union. And, by the way, it's very funny also

Scotsman

A masterwork by the incomparable, genre-defying, wondrous Italo Calvino.

You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You like it. But there is a printer's error in your copy. You take it back to the shop and get a replacement. But the replacement seems to be a totally different story. You try to track down the original book you were reading but end up with a different narrative again. This remarkable novel leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary and a quest. But the real hero of them all is you, the reader.

'Breathtakingly inventive' David Mitchell

'A writer of dizzying ambition and variety, each of his stories is a fresh adventure into the possibilities of fiction' Guardian

Read more
You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You try to track down the original book you were reading but end up with a different narrative again. This remarkable novel leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary and a quest.
Read more
'Breathtakingly inventive' David Mitchell

Product details

ISBN
9780099430896
Published
1992-02-20
Publisher
Vintage Publishing
Weight
194 gr
Height
198 mm
Width
130 mm
Thickness
17 mm
Age
01, G, 01
Language
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet

Translated by

Biographical note

Italo Calvino (Author)
Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in Italy. He was an essayist and journalist and a member of the editorial staff of Einaudi in Turin. One of the most respected writers of the twentieth century, his best-known works of fiction include Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Marcovaldo and Mr Palomar. In 1973 he won the prestigious Premio Feltrinelli. He died in 1985. A collection of Calvino's posthumous personal writings, The Hermit in Paris, was published in 2003.

William Weaver (Translator)
William Weaver has translated Umberto Eco, Italo Svevo, Primo Levi, Italo Calvino and Roberto Calasso, among others. He is a professor at Bard College.