If on a winter's night a traveler

The book begins with a chapter on the art and nature of reading, and is subsequently divided into twenty-two passages. The odd-numbered passages and the final passage are narrated in the second person. That is, they concern events purportedly happening to the novel's reader. (Some contain further discussions about whether the man narrated as "you" is the same as the "you" who is actually reading.) These chapters concern the reader's adventures in reading Italo Calvino's novel, If on a winter's night a traveller. Eventually the reader meets a woman named Ludmilla, who is also addressed in her own chapter, separately, and also in the second person.

Alternating between second-person narrative chapters of this story are the remaining (even) passages, each of which is a first chapter in ten different novels, of widely varying style, genre, and subject-matter. All are broken off, for various reasons explained in the interspersed passages, most of them at some moment of plot climax.

The second-person narrative passages develop into a fairly cohesive novel that puts its two protagonists on the track of an international book-fraud conspiracy, a mischievous translator, a reclusive novelist, a collapsing publishing house, and several repressive governments.

The chapters which are the first chapters of different books all push the narrative chapters along. Themes which are introduced in each of the first chapters will then exist in succeeding narrative chapters, such as after reading the first chapter of a detective novel, then the narrative story takes on a few common detective-style themes. There are also phrases and descriptions which will be eerily similar between the narrative and the new stories.

The theme of a writer's objectivity appears also in Calvino's novel Mr. Palomar, which explores if absolute objectivity is possible, or even agreeable. Other themes include the subjectivity of meaning, the relationship between fiction and life, what makes an ideal reader and author, and authorial originality.

The main character in the first part of each chapter is you, the reader. The narrative starts out when you begin reading a book but then all of the pages are out of order. You then go to a bookstore to get a new copy of the book. When at the bookstore, you meet a girl, Ludmilla, who becomes an important character in the book. You think Ludmilla is beautiful, and you both share a love of books. Throughout the rest of the narrative, you and Ludmilla develop a relationship while on the quest for the rest of the book you had started reading. There are a number of minor characters that appear at various points in the story including Lotaria (Ludmilla's sister), Ermes Marana (a translation scammer), and Silas Flannery (an author).

In a 1985 interview with Gregory Lucente, Calvino stated If on a winter's night a traveller was "clearly" influenced by the writings of Vladimir Nabokov.[2] The book was also influenced by the author's membership in the literary group Oulipo.[3] The structure of the text is said to be an adaptation of the structural semiology of A.J. Greimas.[3]

In a letter written to critic Lucio Lombardo Radice dated November 13, 1979 (published in Italo Calvino: letters, 1941–1985), Calvino mentions Mikhail Bulgakov, Yasunari Kawabata, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Juan Rulfo, José María Arguedas, Jorge Luis Borges and G.K. Chesterton as having influenced, in various ways, the narrative style of the ten stories that comprise the book.[4]

Dave Langford reviewed If on a winter's night a traveller for White Dwarf #45, and stated that "a splendidly batty book about books. [...] Offbeat and fun."[5]

The Telegraph included the novel in 69th place in a list of "100 novels everyone should read" in 2009, describing it as a "playful postmodernist puzzle".[6]

Author David Mitchell described himself as being "magnetised" by the book from its start when he read it as an undergraduate, but on rereading it, felt it had aged and that he did not find it "breathtakingly inventive" as he had the first time, yet does stress that "however breathtakingly inventive a book is, it is only breathtakingly inventive once" – with once being better than never.[7]

Novelist and lecturer Scarlett Thomas uses it to teach innovative contemporary fiction, as an example of different kinds of narrative techniques.[8]

Sting named his 2009 album If on a Winter's Night... after the book.[9]

English musician and composer Bill Ryder-Jones released the album If... on 14 November 2011. The album is a musical adaptation of the book and serves as an "imaginary film score".[10]

• One Thousand and One Nights
• Pale Fire
• "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"
• Self-reference