After reading the first 90 pages of Italo Calvino’s, “If On A Winter Night’s A Traveler,” I came to the understanding that the novel was about a bunch of smaller stories packed into it. During our class discussion on Tuesday, we talked about this and how Calvino is affectively using different types of writing-styles to engage and keep us intrigued and interested. At the beginning of every chapter and story, he started off with something different that eventually lead us — the reader — to understand that we were reading about new characters. At the start of page 91, however, we the readers, quickly realize that we are talking about characters who we’ve already met. It is at this point that I realized all the short stories we were reading — If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, Outside the Town of Malbork, Leaning from the Steep Slope etc. — were part of the novels that the narrator and Ludmilla were reading and missing the endings to their stories. Maybe I was the only one to pick up on this so late in the book, but I found it to be another effective way to lure us into the novel.
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As I have read and analyzed this book, it has made me think of a movie I saw this summer. Anyone see a movie called Crash? I think it woudl classify under as an art film. The movie like the book has several stories going on. Each seems to be separate. However, the people in the stories combine some and have relationships/interact to one another. For example, the a character in one story is the brother of another character in another. Like the book, you have to pay attention to the stories taking place in the movie in order to understand it. Two common subjects that bring the stories together are addressing racism and cultural misunderstandings. Two common things among the stories taking place in the book is it having women character and the “I” changes. I wonder if like the movie if any of the stories will combine by the end of the book.