[Italo Calvino chooses in "If no a Winter's Night a Traveler"] to play a wonderful game. He will make fun of the novel and novelists, the critics of novels and novelists, and the teachers of novels that have been sanctified by critics. He will nod knowingly at Modernism and its preposterous explicators. He will parody bad Germans, dyspeptic Eastern Europeans, the mad librarians of Latin America and even the Japanese…. He will end up, in spite of himself, writing a love story that, in spite of itself, is as complicated as a jigsaw puzzle of the void.

Reference is made to the void, and vertigo, and nothingness, and the chasm, and the abyss. Reference is also made to the Reader, the Other Reader and the Non-Reader….

[One] chapter yields to the next, as each beginning is aborted, as presentiment quarrels with evasion.

So many stories begin, and none...