[Things get complicated in If on a winter's night a traveler.] Novels keep beginning; before you have finished this book and turned out the light you'll have read eleven of them. (p. 641)

[The] eleven beginnings are not equal in value, though most of them will cause any professional writer to salivate. Jorge Luis Borges plays fine tricks with logic and philosophy, and he has infected Calvino, who here tries to write about ideas instead of with them. But those sections of the story pass quickly.

Calvino's real subject is fiction. The making of it (we see several writers and we read more than a dozen styles) and the reading of it (here he spreads his wings and flies). He can be comic, and he is, but for the most part he is serious, positive, celebratory. The eight readers in the library at the end say fine things about...