If on a winter’s night a traveler
Calvino uses the author/reader relationship and the expectations of a linear print novel to defy printed text conformity in If on a winter’s night a traveler. Like Hopscotch, it is interactive, but in a very different way. The reader, in this case, is directly addressed by the author (see a great essay on meta-fiction by Jennifer Smith here), and pulled into the author's ideas of readership and expectation by continuously reading the first chapter of a novel, and in between, following the protagonist's hunt for the rest of this novel.
The first paragraph of the “novel” (actually chapter two of the printed text) is perhaps the best example of pulling the reader into the experience I have ever seen. Coming directly after a chapter one meta-text in which the author not only speaks directly to the reader, but narrates his every move as he visits the bookstore, puts his feet up, opens the book, the melting into the story with the description of the train station, poignantly expresses the readerly experience of being absorbed into a work of fiction. From the obvious presence of the author/narrator to the immersive experience of falling into a novel:
The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph. In the odor of the station there is a passing whiff of station café odor. There is someone looking through the befogged glass, he opens the glass door of the bar, everything is misty, inside, too, as if seen by nearsighted eyes, or eyes irritated by coal dust. The pages of the book are clouded like the windows of an old train, the cloud of smoke rests on the sentences. It is a rainy evening; the man enters the bar; he unbuttons his damp overcoat; a cloud of steam enfolds him; a whistle dies away along tracks that are glistening with rain, as far as the eye can see. (Calvino 10)
