If on a winter's night a traveler
Italo Calvino (1979)
“A novel about the act of reading that makes you fall in love with reading — and with the impossibility of ever finishing anything.”
Character Analysis
The Reader is addressed in second person throughout — a 'you' that is both a fictional character within the novel and the actual person holding the book. This doubling is the novel's foundational device: everything that happens to 'You' (buying the book, meeting Ludmilla, chasing the text) is simultaneously a description of and an instruction for the act of reading. The Reader's defining trait is desire — for the next page, for the correct text, for Ludmilla, for completion.
Addressed in educated, literate second person — assumed to be a habitual novel-reader with access to bookstores, publishers, and universities.