Books: Mirror Writing

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IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER by Italo Calvino Translated by William Weaver Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 260 pages; $12.95

Italo Calvino, quite possibly the best Italian novelist alive, is one of those storytellers who hold the mirror up to nature and then write about the mirror. The scholarly collector of Italian Folktales, Calvino can leave an impression that he would give anything to escape his self-conscious world of double takes and write a simple, earthy "Once upon a time ..." When an interviewer inquired about the intention of If on a winter's night a traveler, Calvino answered: "I would like people to feel that beyond the written word is the multiplicity and unforeseeable aspect of life." But seldom has the case against literature been argued more literarily, with such dazzling artifice and writer's pure device.

Calvino's latest novel is, in fact, an act of the imagination about ten acts of the imagination—gathering the fragments of ten separate novels into one. Says the author: "By having so many literary models, I was trying to say that the world is so rich and inexhaustible that writings can never keep up with it." Perhaps not, but Calvino makes a manly effort. It all begins with that traveler on that winter's night in a railroad station. Outside, much fog. Inside, much steam from the espresso machine. Suddenly the reader stumbles into the kitchen realism of a Polish novel featuring an onion being fried by a young woman called Brigd. Franz Kafka would be right at home.

Just as rudely, a Japanese novel interrupts. An innocent student literally trips into the lustful arms of the mother of his beloved. Crouched behind separate panels, the daughter and her father watch silently as the passion progresses—while ever so symbolically the ginkgo leaves fall in the garden. By avoiding eye contact with everybody, including the mother, the sensitive young man saves face all around.

Or so one assumes. For by then the reader is being shuttled back and forth into a sort of James Bond thriller by an Irishman named Silas Flannery. What is the explanation for this terminal case of non sequitur? Bungling in the bindery? Or should blame—and credit—be assigned to the Organization for the Electronic Production of Homogenized Literary Works, operating out of New York to reduce all fiction to One Novel? Or is the erratic anthology the fault of an odd chap named Ermes Marana, who dashes about the world scribbling novels in native languages and native styles, then dashes home to translate them?

To play detective in his mystery of the mixed-up book, Calvino enlists a couple of readers: an unnamed male addressed only as "you" and a charming novel addict named Ludmilla, also known as the Other Reader. In the course of tracking down clues, the readers interview a senescent professor, an editor of a publishing house who talks like a rejection slip and a confirmed nonreader who glues books shut and applies a coat of varnish, thereupon producing pop sculptures.

By this time anything seems possible except that Calvino, 57, now an editor of the Turin house Giulio Einaudi Editore, was once a Marxist, a veteran of the World War II Resistance, who believed, in his youth, that literature should be dedicated to "political engagement," to "social battle."