I was wondering a lot about greatness while reading this. I don’t think Italo Calvino is one of the greats, but I do love what he does. There is something a bit Borgesian about this, maybe Kafkaesque or maybe a bit more delightfully Snicketesque, and I think Calvino almost earns his own adjectivification, but not quite. This is a series of beginnings, a collection of stories by an author that doesn’t enjoy writing the ends, a love letter about reading and then on the contrarywise a bit about writing, like the man from Borges who determines to write Don Quixote or like the man from DFW who determines to make the ultimate entertainment or like the man from Nabokov who gets tangled in the endnotes of Pale Fire. All wrapped in a delightful second-person framing device of international intrique, conspiracy, and apocrypha.

The downside, I think, which contributes to Calvino not getting adjectified despite his many delightfully experimental trips into Weird Novels, is that the collection of stories are not sufficiently…different? I mean obviously the interweaving themes and characters are deliberate symbols constructing the kaleidoscope of the story, and the story itself must still be simple in its own symbolism. But at the end of the day I am not heartbroken or bewildered or converted or ecstatic, at the end of the day I simply read a book which I enjoyed.