NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE AND READER CONSTRUCTION: A READING OF SE UM VIAJANTE NUMA NOITE DE INVERNO, BY ITALO CALVINO

In “La mancata fortuna del romanzo italiano” (1995), Calvino discusses the reasons why the romance did not assert itself as a genre, counteracting  the “fearless and adventurous” texts from other literatures. After assuring the fatherhood of the genre in Italy to Manzoni, he observes that what was missing was in fact one of his main characteristics: the adventure. From this finding,  Calvino asks how it would be, nowadays, the Italian adventure romance. The questioning made around the 1950s (the text above is from 1953) sketches, to our understanding, a practical response 25 years later in the romance called Se um viajante numa noite de inverno (1979), in which Calvino narrates the "adventure" of the Reader who dives into a tangling romanesque discourses that never complete themselves. Such seduction strategy is associated to the actual narrative construction of Calvino, who conceives the romance as a "machine envisaged to tell a story that fascinates the readers."  (CALVINO apud NETO, 1997, p. 141). Calvino's words express two aspects of utmost importance in his literature - which will be fundamental in Se um viajante numa noite de inverno: the concern with the narrative architecture and the fascination that the plot must exert on the reader. In this reading of  Se um viajante numa noite de inverno we intend to highlight how these two aspects are imbricated in the romance, enabling Calvino to make true his so-dreamed Italian "adventure romance" from the problematization of the relation writer and public-reader. 

THE WAKE UP OF THE READER IN TERRA SONÂMBULA NOVEL

Terra Sonâmbula novel (1992) from Mozambican writer Mia Couto was published just in the year that civil war has been finished. The plot talks about a reading of Kindzu’s books by Muldinga boy to the old Tuahir. This reading becomes a vanishing point of a desolate land and a hopeless life to become in a gate of dreams. The narrative allows a study of compositional strategies, but those discussed here promote the reader’s  instance having as theoretical studies of Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes. The aim is to demonstrate how these characters/readers are manifested in the working plan and  seek hybridity in the proclamation of national identity. Thus, the empirical-readers are invited to wake up, bet, decipher puzzles spreaded by Mia couto throughout the ovel in a position of de-automatzation.