Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler is often praised for its formal ingenuity, but the interruptions are not merely a parade of experiments. Each beginning establishes a promise about genre, voice and the reader’s expectations, then demonstrates how quickly those promises become habits.
The second-person reader is not simply a gimmick. It makes the act of wanting to continue part of the subject. We become impatient, suspicious and complicit in the search for the “real” book. I am curious whether readers find the ending a completion of that argument or another refusal to let the reader settle.
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