If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
By: Italo Calvino / Narrated By: Jefferson Mays
Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
Hmmm… Will this be a delightful Second Listen…?!
Oh eeeeons ago—like 5-years, 1-month, 4-days—I was aaaall into writing: Reviews on Audible, Ideas to Develop into novels. I fancied m’self a Writer, with an entire 180,000+ word manuscript getting turned down by all and sundry. Exciting times! Exuberant times!
I consumed all things Literary like it was going outta style; didn’t matter how cohesive something was: If the author had a way with words, master vocabulary, was able to weave a gazillion (And six!) threads together, had a flair for imagery? I was THERE (And this was, like, 7-months before Audiobook Accomplice became Big Sis’s and my—and our Angel, Maman’s—baby…)! So imagine how thrilled, how tickled to death I was when I came across If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler by Wordsmith Extraordinaire Italo Calvino. Where there is no plot, but the writing is delicious.
I reviewed it and loved it.
But if you’ll note? It came enTIREly from a writer’s perspective. Calvino’s writing? Mesmerizing. Yeh yeh yeh, I mention the lack of plot—Literary Novel, you know—but then I wax on and on and on about the fanTAStic writing and about how delightful I found the whole experience. Yessss, I’d found it to be an experience what with it’s shattered Fourth Wall and all that.
But here we come to NOW, and what do I think upon this, a second Listen?
Oh OUCH, and dude! I fell asleep around 20-times!!!
And here’s the thing about dozing off during an audiobook: Uuuusually I’m going along, don’t even realize I’ve nodded off, wake up, and the book is over, done. I groooan, and think: Dang it! Now I have to back up and find my place!
This time? I nodded off, woke up, and the DAMNED thing is STILL GOING! This inspired the flat-out wail of, “Oh my gosh! I have to back up, find my place, and I’m STILL going to have MORE FREAKING STORY to get through!!!
Which ain’t a good look, for any story, from any author…
What is the story? Okay, here we go: “YOU” the listener are the protagonist. YOU start a book, Calvino’s new one, and right where it gets good, it stops and another story starts. Whilst trying to find out whatthehell is going on, YOU run into Ludmilla, a young and free-spirited woman who is also a trifle chagrined by the whole switcheroo. A hunt of sorts starts, and soon YOU discover that there are MULtiple stories within this book, all with a hint of tension, all ending riiiiiight at the good part, leaving frustration and riled feelings in their wake.
And that’s it. Add nuuuumerous instances of women’s nether regions just happening to wind up on men’s engorged members, and I was well and truly done. The writing? Oh lovely and well-done… I s’pose. The point? Well, I had to hit Wikipedia for it cuz I was sooo over such self-indulgence and sooo wanting to get the heck back to sleep.
Now Big Sis? Oh she liked it tremendously, and dude! did she find lovely threads of life and death and everything in between within the 10-hours (To me? A gazillion—and six—hours). She found the dance of men and women, of women leading the way. She found how we live, the choices we make, the opportunities to meet death with peace and dignity.
So there’s that… And she listens with a ready and well-adjusted critical ear, so she’s by no means an Easy Room.
Quick note on Jefferson Mays: Smooth, pleasing to the ear, adds tension… when there IS tension, and tho I was sorely aggravated by each Woman Just Can’t Keep Her Exposed Breasts And Nether Regions To Herself excessive inclusions, Mays did not add to my great disdain/despair. So huzzah to him!
And so, now I shall leave you with what I learned from Wikipedia. It’s beautiful, lovely, well-done. When all is said and done, the reader/listener is to take the chapter titles and string them together to make this sentence: If on a winter's night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave— What story down there awaits its end?—he asks, anxious to hear the story.
As I said, beautiful, lovely.
But dude! I coulda just looked at the Chapters and gone the heck back to sleeeeep!!!
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