Word: reader
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...rich and inexhaustible that writings can never keep up with it." Perhaps not, but Calvino makes a manly effort. It all begins with that traveler on that winter's night in a railroad station. Outside, much fog. Inside, much steam from the espresso machine. Suddenly the reader stumbles into the kitchen realism of a Polish novel featuring an onion being fried by a young woman called Brigd. Franz Kafka would be right at home...
...assumes. For by then the reader is being shuttled back and forth into a sort of James Bond thriller by an Irishman named Silas Flannery. What is the explanation for this terminal case of non sequitur? Bungling in the bindery? Or should blame-and credit-be assigned to the Organization for the Electronic Production of Homogenized Literary Works, operating out of New York to reduce all fiction to One Novel? Or is the erratic anthology the fault of an odd chap named Ermes Marana, who dashes about the world scribbling novels in native languages and native styles, then dashes home...
...play detective in his mystery of the mixed-up book, Calvino enlists a couple of readers: an unnamed male addressed only as "you" and a charming novel addict named Ludmilla, also known as the Other Reader. In the course of tracking down clues, the readers interview a senescent professor, an editor of a publishing house who talks like a rejection slip and a confirmed nonreader who glues books shut and applies a coat of varnish, thereupon producing pop sculptures...
Does life have the final say, as promised, or does Calvino have the last word -like any other author? "You," the reader, will have to decide for yourself as your new bride Ludmilla closes her book, puts her head on the pillow and asks: "Aren't you tired of reading...
Terres also explores the arcane richness of animal behavior and man's beliefs about it. Ibis guano, the reader learns, enriches the ecology of the Everglades by increasing plankton growth; a loon can be imitated on the ocarina; geese occasionally become homosexual, pair-bonding for life even when heterosexual partners are present; an auk's egg is a marvel of engineering, shaped so that it will not roll from its cliff-edge nest...