And how about the audacious structure? Each manuscript is interrupted after too few exquisite pages, obliging 'You' to hunt for its continuation through a landscape of bookshops, rarefied campuses, shifty publishers, refined censors, reading rooms and literary guerrillas.Įach time 'You' (and you) get your hands on the continuation of the last interrupted story, it turns out, agonisingly, to be a brand-new one: but each one, after a line or two, becomes as enticing and addictive as its predecessor. Then there was the novel's giddying (what I soon learned to call) intertextuality, where the protagonist 'You' comes across 12 manuscripts written in the style of a Bogart movie, Borges, Chekhov, a spaghetti western, Mishima, and so on. A second-person protagonist? Unthinkable as two George Bushes. A novel that referred to its own existence? As offworldly an idea as the non-existence of the Soviet Union. It was everything that A-level A Passage to India and As You Like It hadn't been. Let the world around you fade.' From the opening line of this eccentric book, which I first encountered as an undergraduate 16 years ago, I was magnetised. 'Y ou are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveller.

Our ancestors italo calvino