Calvino's If on a winter's night Reading Order

Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler (1979) is the most playful and most celebrated of the postmodern metafictions — a novel in which the reader ('you') is the protagonist, who begins reading a novel called If on a winter's night a traveler, discovers it is misprinted, and embarks on a quest to find the real book, which keeps turning out to be a different novel than expected. Calvino structures the novel as alternating chapters: the odd-numbered chapters address 'you' directly in the second person, narrating your quest for the missing novel through bookshops and publishers and a mysterious woman named Ludmilla; the even-numbered chapters are the opening pages of ten completely different novels by ten different fictional authors — a Polish thriller, a Japanese novel, a South American novel — each of which breaks off before it can be completed. The novel is simultaneously a celebration of reading's pleasures and a meditation on the impossibility of completing the reading experience, on the relationship between author and reader, and on the nature of literary desire. Calvino had already published Invisible Cities (1972) and The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) when he wrote it; If on a winter's night a traveler is his final and most structurally radical novel.