How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
"I rather enjoy the sense of bewilderment a novel gives you when you start reading it, but if the first effect is fog, I'm afraid the moment the fog lifts my pleasure in reading will be lost, too." (3.20)
You've just met Ludmilla, who comments on the style of the novel you've both been reading. As she explains to you what kinds of books she enjoys, she suggests that books that begin in a "foggy" way allow your mind to set up an infinite number of possible plotlines. But a book like this can never fulfill the promise of such expectations—it's just setting itself up to disappoint you. That's just the nature of an open-ended beginning, which can't stay open-ended forever. It's kind of like hearing "You can be whoever you want" as a child, and then getting older and having to actually decide who you're going to be. Bummer.
Quote #5
[Y]ou turn the page and find yourself facing two blank sheets. You are dazed, contemplating the whiteness cruel as a wound, almost hoping it is your dazzled eyesight casting a blinding glare on the book, from which, gradually, the zebra rectangle of inked letters will return to the surface. (5.3)
Your second attempt at reading, this one involving a book called Outside the town of Malbork, has been interrupted. This time, rather than having the first chapter repeated over and over, a printing error has caused every two pages to be printed properly, and every third and fourth to be blank. You have just enough in front of you to make you try to keep reading, but it's no use. BAH.
The first time, it could have been random. But now, you feel like this is what Calvino has in store for you for the rest of the book—he gives you just enough material to make you keep grasping at empty air. The satisfaction that's just barely out of reach is always more crushing than the one's that's light years away.
Quote #6
And so Marana proposes to the Sultan a stratagem prompted by the literary tradition of the Orient: he will break off this translation at the moment of greatest suspense and will start translating another novel, inserting it into the first through some rudimentary expedient; for example, a character in the first novel opens a book and starts reading. The second novel will also break off to yield to a third, which will not proceed very far before opening into a fourth, and so on....
Marana has decided to help a Sultan keep his wife from setting off a revolution in their country, the fear being that as soon as the Sultana finishes her book, she will feel ready to call on the revolutionaries. So Marana devises a plan to constantly break off her books at their most interesting moment, constantly causing the Sultana to turn to her next book, then the next, and endlessly postponing the moment of revolution. For the first time, the book comments directly on how provoking a reader's disappointment can be used for strategic ends. And—you guessed it—this refers back to what Calvino is doing with his own novel.