"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." With these words, which open his latest novel, Calvino confronts the relationship of the world of fiction to the world of actuality. The rest of his book shows how the fictive imagination interacts with reality and how each is dependent on the other. Calvino takes Descartes a step further: "The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, 'I read, therefore it writes.'" (p. 34)

[In] his stories and such earlier novels as Cosmicomics and Invisible Cities, he moves back and forth between different levels of reality, mixing legend and anecdote, the distant past and the present. Calvino's surrealism works because he nearly always has one foot planted firmly in the world of ordinary...