If on a winter's night a traveler - Italo Calvino (1979)

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If on a winter's night a traveler (Italian: Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore) is a 1979 novel by the Italian writer and journalist Italo Calvino (1823-1985). Calvino was much admired in Britain, Australia and the United States, and at the time of his death was the most translated contemporary Italian writer.

Using shifting structures, a succession of tales, and different points of view, the book probes the nature of change, coincidence, and chance and the interdependence of fiction and reality. It examines living and reading as interchangeable metaphors for each other, as well as the expectations of the reader, the intentions of the author, and the tension between the two.
The novel, which is nonlinear, begins with a man discovering that the copy of a novel he has recently purchased and is about to begin reading is defective: a Polish novel has been bound within its pages. He returns to the bookshop the following day and meets a young woman who is on an identical mission. They both profess a preference for the Polish novel. The act of reading has brought these two strangers together; the balance of the novel juxtaposes scenes from their lives with the fiction that they read. Interposed between the chapters in which the two strangers attempt to authenticate their texts are ten excerpts that parody genres of contemporary world fiction, such as the Latin American novel and the political novel of eastern Europe. When the titles of the fragmentary fictions are read in order—as they are by a character near the end of the narrative—they form a sentence: "If on a winter's night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave— What story down there awaits its end?—he asks, anxious to hear the story."

"The loops of their impossible journey are postmodern, but the tone isn’t abstract or cerebral—it’s funny and sweet. The metafiction of Calvino’s novel, literally addressed to “you,” dramatizes the difficulty of paying attention and finding just the right book. Ironically, it’s totally easy to read, as the Reader’s choices flip from romance to thriller to realist novel, all interwoven with one man’s journey to find his love."