Krishna
If you think the title is odd, wait until you read the book!
The book starts oddly. It begins with the author telling you about the fact that you have heard of a new novel by Italo Calvino called ‘If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller’ and you decide to go and buy that book. Then follows a description of all the books in the library and how you resist temptations to succumb to other books to get to this book. And then this is about you, the Reader. And On and On. The Reader becomes a character and meets the Other Reader, Ludmilla, a woman who – guess what? – likes to read.
The whole book is about the pleasure of reading, authorship and weird gyrations of the same two or three people in different stories. It is about you (I am not kidding!) wanting to read a book and every time you open ‘the book’ you want to read, you get a different story, unwittingly. Now you want to read that story, and it gets snatched away from you and when you thought you found it again, you get another story. Unlike Cloud Atlas, a brilliant juxtaposition of different stories, these are only half stories, dropped in the middle, never to be taken up again. And they span all genres, including the last few where the singular male lusts after women, often very young, and always unresisting.
The story goes crazy and makes no sense. It is all about writing or not being able to write and page after page of boring musings about what the author would like to write and what the reader would like to read and all kinds of roundabout stuff. To make it even more annoying, one of the writers thinks of writing a book with just beginnings of stories and not the endings!
It is a great test to your endurance. I was sorely tempted to abandon reading many times, but only a perseverence to see how bad it could get kept me going, and it was tripe, as I expected.
Ludmilla keeps coming up in various guises in various stories, always fond of books and having insipid conversations with insipid men thinking insipid thoughts. People do not even behave like ordinary people, they keep having random thoughts and even more random actions.
A complete waste of time.
I would give it a 1/10
— Krishna