If On a Winter's Night a Traveler


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One of the most delightful books I have ever read, and one of the few to completely rewrite all the boring old rules of writing with charm and fascination. It's written about you, the reader, and your frustration at not being able to read, or finish, or get the proper text of the book by Italo Calvino, called If on a winter's night a traveller.

This amazingly self-referential text is the most modern of all the novels I've ever read, and is an absorbing and interesting read also. There is no hint of obscurantism or coy hints in the brilliant display of Calvino's wit and invention. The force of the originality of his ideas on the nature of reading and how it really happens is too strong to conveyed in intellectual doubletalk and too original to be hidden behind allusions and intellectual jargon. Compare this to the ridiculous charade of Foucalt's Pendulum by Umberto Eco and you'll see exactly what I mean: Concision in place of verbosity, ideas in place of textual references, a unifying theme carried out to an amzing yet logical conclusion in place of formless rambling petering out to nothing.

My Schizo Diary probably wouldn't have been written without the inspiration of this book. This book helped me to realize that what we call reading is an idea that has been scarcely expanded or considered as of today, and to examine the act of reading as a schizophrenic act, where the reader is reading what he's written and forgotten, because he's a schizophrenic amnesiac.

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