The premise for this novel was so good I had to buy it right there on the Heathrow bookshop table, heaving with more accessible novels. Here’s the blurb I read: “You go into a booksop and buy If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You like it. But there’s a printer’s error in your copy. You take it back to the shop and get a replacement. But the replacement seems to be a totally different story. You try to track down the original book you were reading but end up with a different book again…” Calvino drops you, the reader, in this mess and constantly throws you into different, ever more gripping opening chapters of different novels, but something happens and you begin to see recurring characters, although their identities are hidden, and things keep getting stranger, until it all comes together in the end. I enjoyed the novel but felt it was making literary points above my pay grade, and in the end I was left thinking “so what?” Interesting, but I think I would have prererred Vonnegut to have taken the premise and run with it. So it goes.
No. 5 of 50 books I intend to read and review in 2025.
I’m Patrick Sherriff, an Englishman who survived 13 years working for newspapers in the US, UK and Japan. Between teaching English lessons at my conversation school in Abiko, Japan, I write and illustrate textbooks for non-native speakers of English, release Hana Walker mystery novels, short stories, paint, and write essays and Our Man in Abiko, a monthly newsletter highlighting good writing in English, often about about Japan, art, crime fiction and teaching.
Patrick Sherriff 