if on a winter's night a traveller

by Italo Calvino

I have never encountered a book so mad and beautiful at the same time as Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveller. As a book, it inspires you to read it over and over again. It is almost the reason highlighters, post-it flags and annotation in books was even invented. It's that mad. And beautiful. At the same time. 

I want to say that reading it is like sitting in a train, looking out a window, wrapped in a blanket, sipping coffee. (With your feet up, of course). But that's too obvious. And not enough. It's fragmented, and even half way through, you can only begin to see it coming together - fragments of a novel, a pattern in it, somewhere. But you're not convinced. The author (by which I mean Calvino) keeps throwing unresolved, mad, fragmented bits at you; and you, you have no choice but to give yourself up to them. Besides, Calvino describes it bestest himself, anyway. (Because this book is that good.) Right in the beginning, and you think he is saying it to tease you, but he's actually giving you a warning, he says: "Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears." 

Of course I underlined it immediately and put a little smiley face next to it. Of. Course. I did. Little did I know. 

The whole book, in its fragments goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. And all you can do is sigh, feel like you're being cheated, but plough on regardless because this is a master at his craft you're reading. And he's pulling tricks nobody has ever pulled before, like a true magician who doesn't need to show off, but ends up doing it anyway. 

You can only watch, enthralled, and hope that there is, somewhere in the horizon, a reward for listening to this mad man's story.