What: Italo Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is about someone ("you") trying to read a book called If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino. (With me so far?) The reading is interrupted by, among other things, missing pages, a foundering publishing house, literary guerrillas, and an international conspiracy.
Comparable to: It won't surprise you to learn that David Mitchell, the author of Cloud Atlas, was an instant fan the first time he read it. See also other twisty-structure-meta works of classic literature, such as One Thousand and One Nights, Pale Fire, and Tristram Shandy.
Opening lines: "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, 'No, I don't want to watch TV!' Raise your voice --- they won't hear you otherwise --- 'I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!'"
Representative quote: "Because in this way all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life was too dense and rarefied and embroiled for me to bear it always with me, imagine so many lives, each with its own past and the pasts of the other lives that continue to become entangled one with the others."
You might not like it if: It seems too much like compulsory reading for an undergraduate course in postmodern fiction. (Which, let's face it, is exactly what it is.)
How to get it: Buy or borrow it in print. Not Kindle-able (yet) --- although that would have the potential for an interesting experience.
Connections to previous Wreckage: David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas was Rec. #140. To see how this sort of thing can sometimes be made into a movie, watch Tristram Shandy (Rec. #112).
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