Post #2: Reading Calvino While Editing My Book
What If on a winter’s night a traveler Taught Me About Writing My Book
You open a book expecting to read a story. Instead, the story keeps slipping away. The beginning is promising. The voice is right. You lean in—only to be interrupted, redirected, or handed something adjacent but unfinished. This sounds like a critique. It isn’t. It’s a description of a particular kind of literary experience—one I didn’t fully understand until I found myself writing a book that behaved the same way.
That experience has a name: If on a winter’s night a traveler, by Italo Calvino. First published in 1979, the novel opens by addressing you and me, the reader, and then proceeds to deny us the one thing readers are usually promised: completion. Each time the story gathers momentum, it fractures—resetting into another beginning, another voice, another almost-story. It is playful, maddening, and deeply intentional.
I didn’t read Calvino while writing the first draft of my book. But reading him during the editing process felt like discovering a distant literary cousin—one who shares the same habit of interrupting itself to tell the truth sideways.
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought.
— Italo Calvino
What Calvino Is Really Doing
On the surface, If on a winter’s night a traveler seems to be famously experimental. It’s written in second person. It contains the opening chapters of ten different novels, none of which are finished. (And that sounds a lot like my “someday” pile of titles and story starts.) We, the readers, become a character, chasing the rest of a story that never quite materializes.
But beneath the formal cleverness, Calvino is doing something quieter—and far more human.
He’s writing about desire.
About the way readers fall in love with beginnings. About the anticipation that builds in the first pages of a story, when everything is still possible. About the frustration of interruption—and the strange realization that the wanting itself might be the point. This isn’t a novel that withholds meaning. It simply refuses to package it neatly.
Fragmentation Is Not the Enemy
For a long time, I thought fragmentation was a structural problem to solve.
While writing my book, I wrestled with timelines that refused to behave. Journal entries arrived out of sequence. Voices from the past interrupted the present. Poetry emerged where exposition would have been more efficient. Meaning accumulated in layers rather than revealing itself all at once.
At first, this felt like a lack of discipline.
But Calvino helped me see something I had been circling for months: fragmentation can be a form of honesty.
Reading is going towards something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.
— Italo Calvino
Life rarely delivers its truths in a clean narrative arc. Memory interrupts. History speaks late. Understanding arrives sideways, or too slowly, or in pieces that don’t immediately assemble. Why should my story—about legacy, power, and inheritance—pretend otherwise?
In Calvino’s novel, fragmentation isn’t a gimmick. It’s the mechanism by which meaning is revealed. Each unfinished beginning sharpens the reader’s awareness of what they’re longing for. The gaps do the work.
Interruption as Narrative Truth
One of the most interesting parallels between Calvino’s work and my own is the role of interruption.
In If on a winter’s night a traveler, interruptions take the form of printing errors, mistranslations, academic tangents, and false starts. The story is constantly diverted, not because it’s careless, but because diversion is the subject.
In my book, interruption arrives through different means: through memory, through inherited texts, through voices that refuse to stay in their assigned time. The past intrudes on the present. Knowledge is partial. Answers arrive late—or not at all.
In both cases, I’ve realized interruption isn’t a flaw in the storytelling.
It is the storytelling.
Desire Over Resolution
There is a particular discomfort that comes with unfinished narratives. We’re trained to expect resolution—to believe that if we read closely enough, wait patiently enough, the story will eventually explain itself.
Calvino challenges that.
The story remains suspended, unfinished.
— Italo Calvino
He suggests that endings are not always revelations, but choices. That to finish a story is to close off other possibilities. That something essential is lost when uncertainty collapses into certainty.
Writing my own book taught me the same lesson. I wasn’t trying to deny resolution. I was trying to be honest about how rarely it arrives intact.
Some questions echo longer than others. Some truths can only be approached indirectly. Some stories don’t conclude so much as settle—into memory, into implication, into quiet recognition.
Reading Calvino as a Writer
Reading If on a winter’s night a traveler didn’t change how I write. It clarified why I write the way I do.
It reminded me that stories are not machines designed to deliver answers. They are experiences—often incomplete ones—that invite readers to participate, to linger, to sit with uncertainty rather than escape it.
For writers, that’s both unsettling and freeing.
It means the goal isn’t perfection of structure, but coherence of feeling. Not obedience to form, but fidelity to truth—even when that truth arrives in fragments.
The Comfort of Unfinished Things
There is comfort, I think, in stories that refuse to behave.
They don’t rush us toward understanding. They don’t pretend that meaning is always immediate or singular. They trust us to live with ambiguity, to carry questions a little longer, to accept that not knowing is sometimes part of the gift.
Calvino understood this. Writing and now editing my book forced me to learn it.
And somewhere between the two, I stopped fearing the unfinished and started listening to what it was trying to say.
Until the next interruption.
