Reader of the Stack » Hubert Aquin

If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino

Ibis — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 23:20:49 +0000

From the back cover:
“If on a winter’s night a traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambiance, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another. They are the true heroes of the novel, for what would writing be without readers?”

My thoughts:
In this metafictional masterpiece, Italo Calvino draws the reader (that’s you) into a bizarre novel that folds in on itself, lying on the page but beyond it. It is a communication between the author and the reader—mediated by the publisher, by the translator, by academics, by government censors, by political movements, by the other reader, and finally by the author and the reader themselves. It is the ultimate exercise in literary self-reflection.

I marvelled continually at Calvino’s genius and there were several passages I loved (including the famous opening chapter in which he anatomises the process of choosing one book to read among the thousands contained in a bookstore). I also had a feeling of discomfort (I don’t know any other way to label it), that is familiar from other Cold War period novels (I’m not sure that the cause has anything to do with the Cold War itself, it’s just a convenient shorthand for the post-WWII to the mid-eighties), like Next Episode and Pale Fire (and even The Fire-Dwellers and St. Urbain’s Horseman). Perhaps I’ll figure out exactly what that is at some point.

Though there is some humour here (mostly of the absurdist variety), this is no light-hearted puzzle. It’s a puzzle that requires considerable concentration and focus to absorb, and time to contemplate it afterward.

CanLit Challenge Book #11: Next Episode by Hubert Aquin

Ibis — Sat, 06 May 2006 16:44:41 +0000

Book 11, Next Episode (1965) – Hubert Aquin
From the back cover:
“First published in l965, Hubert Aquin’s Next Episode is a disturbing and yet deeply moving novel of dissent and distress. As he awaits trial, a young separatist writes an espionage story in the psychiatric ward of the Montreal prison where he has been detained. Sheila Fischman’s bold new translation captures the pulsating life of Aquin’s complex exploration of the political realities of contemporary Quebec. ”

Other useful links:
the Wikipedia article on Hubert Aquin
the Wikipedia article on Next Episode
CBC’s Canada Reads 2003
the Canada Reads reading guide for Next Episode

My thoughts:
I’m definitely going to have to read this one again. All the way through, I kept wishing that it was annotated, that I had a running commentary, that it included a map of Lausanne. I saw a French annotated copy at the bookstore when I picked this up, and I almost wish that I had taken it as well (though my French isn’t so good to begin with). I really liked the layered feeling, the disorientation that the reader is submerged within. In my Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, it says that two of Aquin’s literary influences were Joyce and Nabokov, and I really got that impression while I was reading this. I felt that I was just that much removed from their company.
I was also reading Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red at the same time as this, and there were echoes I felt between the two of those works as well (even though there is almost certainly no real connection between the two). The narrative of “I Will Be Called a Murderer” and the narrator of Next Episode were at one point (for me at least), oddly at one with each other.
I’m going to read this again, most likely after it comes back from its planned bookring, and make further notes as I read it.