I can unequivocally say I have just finished the strangest book I will ever read.

I’ve written about some that were tough to get through, but this is something else entirely. It’s one thing to not be totally clear what’s going on with the plot, but usually you at least know who the characters are and have some sense of what they are working towards.

In Italo Calvino’s “If on a winter’s night a traveler” you are the main character. That’s right, he starts the first chapter by saying “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.”

The chapters then alternate between you reading the text(s) and your increasingly frantic quest to track down a complete copy of this book, and then another, and then another. The first book has a printing error, and each successive time you’re reading the first chapter of a new book that has its own error — and isn’t the one you thought it was — and then trying to find its remainder.

Confused? I think that’s the point. Calvino wants you to stop thinking so much about the ABCs of standard storytelling and look for something else in the text.

After a while this whole process becomes kind of comical. You know you’re reading what will only be the first part of a story, and yet, each one is so engaging you forget for a few pages and are genuinely disappointed when the chapter ends and you realize you have to move on to a new story and new characters.

This is a book about reading — the process, what we look for in a story and what we get out of the act itself. The “books” have nothing to do with one another, but taken together they still represent something.

Usually when I go to write about a book I first go to each of the dog-earred pages, find the section I think I wanted to reference and type it out here. I always include a notation of the speaker in case I need it later. In this case, I didn’t even try to figure out who was talking since the characters are so nebulous.

Again, no idea who said this, but I think it’s an excellent message about how even the smallest experience long ago can play a part in what we do and experience today:

“And so if by chance I happen to dwell on some ordinary detail of an ordinary day…I can be sure that even in this tiny, insignificant episode there is implicit everything I have experienced, all the past, the multiple pasts I have tried in vain to leave behind me, the lives that in the end are soldered into an overall life, my life.”

Calvino also talks about reading in the same way, that books don’t exist in a vacuum:

“Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings.”

Everything you read builds upon what came before it and creates a bigger story. You and I may have read a lot of the same books, but not all of the same ones. Therefore your “book” is different from mine and affects your next bit of reading in a different way than it would affect me.

That quote is from “a fourth reader,” who is just the fourth person to speak at this table full of people who are reading. That just distinguishes them from the “third reader” and the “second reader.” These are not be confused as being linked in any way to “The Reader” (you) or “The Other Reader” (a girl you meet at a bookstore while trying to find a correct copy of the first book). I told you this book wasn’t “normal.”

While I was reading this book my friend Regan posted on Twitter about a slight issue she had with her own reading:

Having turned the page on three or four now-interrupted stories, I could somewhat sympathize. Even one of Calvino’s characters (the reader, not THE The Reader, but another the reader, ugh) laments that kind of disjointed experience:

“I am forced to stop reading just when they become most gripping. I can’t wait to resume, but when I think I am reopening the book I began, I find a completely different book before me.”

But we can also have that same kind of experience with complete books. A single book can change over time, as we change and then go back to it for another reading. Like the quote about small things building up into our “overall life” we approach a repeat reading from a different place, and thus are open to new emotions and interpretations.

The third reader (from the same group as the fourth reader above) isn’t sure if he is changing or if it is the act of reading itself which is just inherently unrepeatable:

“At every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern?”

I’m definitely reading a more standard text next, but glad I made it through this one. Not often you read something so very different.