The book begins with a chapter on the art and nature of
reading, and is subsequently divided into twenty-two passages. The odd-numbered passages and the final passage are narrated in the second person. That is, they concern events purportedly happening to the novel's reader. (Some contain further discussions about whether the person narrated as "you" is the same as the "you" who is actually reading.) These chapters concern the reader's adventures in reading Italo Calvino's novel, ''If on a winter's night a traveler.'' Eventually the reader meets a woman named Ludmilla, who is also addressed in her own chapter, separately, and also in the second person. Alternating between
second-person narrative chapters of this story are the remaining (even) passages, each of which is a first chapter in ten different novels, of widely varying style, genre, and subject-matter. All are broken off, for various reasons explained in the interspersed passages, most of them at some moment of plot climax. The second-person narrative passages develop into a fairly cohesive novel that puts its two protagonists on the track of an international book-fraud conspiracy, a mischievous translator, a reclusive novelist haunted by advertisers who wish to
embed products in his stories and programmers who demand to let a computer generate the conclusion to his unfinished novels, a collapsing publishing house, and several repressive governments. The chapters, which are the first chapters of different books, all push the narrative chapters along. Themes which are introduced in each of the first chapters will then exist in succeeding narrative chapters. For example, after reading the first chapter of a detective novel, the narrative story takes on a few common detective-style themes. There are also phrases and descriptions that are similar between the narrative and the new stories. When the titles of the fragmentary fictions are read in order—as they are by a character near the end of the narrative—they form a sentence: The theme of a writer's objectivity appears also in Calvino's novel
Mr. Palomar, which explores if absolute objectivity is possible, or even agreeable. Other themes include the subjectivity of meaning, the relationship between fiction and life, what makes an ideal reader and author, and authorial originality.
Cimmeria Cimmeria is a fictional country in the novel. The country is described as having existed as an independent state between
World War I and
World War II. The capital is Örkko, and its principal resources are peat and by-products, bituminous compounds. Cimmeria seems to have been located somewhere on the
Gulf of Bothnia, a body of water between
Sweden to the west and
Finland to the east. The country has since been absorbed, and its people and language, of the 'Bothno-Ugaric' group, have both disappeared. As Calvino concludes the alleged, fictional encyclopedia entry concerning Cimmeria: "In successive territorial divisions between her powerful neighbors the young nation was soon erased from the map; the
autochthonous population was dispersed; Cimmerian language and culture had no development". The pair of chapters following the two on Cimmeria and its literature are followed by one describing another fictional country called the Cimbrian People's Republic, which allegedly absorbed Cimmeria after World War II. == Characters ==