If on a winter's night a traveler, by Italo Calvino

[primeideal]

I had read and greatly enjoyed "Invisible Cities" many years ago, and had seen this book mentioned in the context of extremely meta, Yuletide-esque shenanigans. Then I read "Once Upon a Prime" (Sarah Hart) about the connections between math and literature, such as the Oulipo :D and that mentioned several books I was already familiar with but also many others I was not. Most of the litfic recs went to the bottom of my TBR, I'm more interested in working on bingo stuff for now. But this volume was relatively short, and I was ordering a new wifi adapter and wanted to throw in something else for free shipping, etcetera etcetera.

Anyway. I had correctly osmosed that this book is extremely meta, story-within-a-story nonsense. I had not osmosed that it is extremely male-gazey. Like, in "Invisible Cities," the cities are given women's names, but it's still cities that are being described, not people, and Marco Polo and Kublai Khan's conversation doesn't have to do with people. But here, both in the outer stories and the inner stories, there's just a lot of...weird and creepy sexuality.

On the other hand, making fun of pretentious political critics is always fun:

Lotaria wants to know the author's position with regard to Trends of Contemporary Thought and Problems That Demand a Solution. To make your task easier she furnishes you with a list of names of Great Masters among whom you should situate him...If you start arguing, she'll never let you go. Now she is inviting you to a seminar at the university, where books are analyzed according to all Codes, Conscious and Unconscious, and in which all Taboos are eliminated, the ones imposed by the dominant Sex, Class, and Culture.

Other standout moments include:

• a plotline I suspect may have influenced "A Series of Unfortunate Events" in terms of two sides of a shadowy secret organization fighting about books
• a funny scene involving a man who's anxious about telephones because every time a phone rings, he worries that it's for him, even if it can't possibly be his phone. This anticipates the age of cell phones very well for 1979.
• relatedly, impressively "before its time" stuff about whether computer-generated (or analyzed) books will make human authors (or critics) obsolete
• when the "Reader" tries to explain that his problem is that he keeps getting to read only the first chapter of a book before it's replaced by a completely different one, another character points out: "With me, more and more often I happen to pick up a novel that has just appeared and I find myself reading the same book I have read a hundred times."
• the proper names or motifs that reoccur among multiple stories and suggest that they might sort of be related even if they're not reminded me of "Winter Journeys." Which I should probably reread at some point? If only to confirm it is less creepy.

Anyway, the fic for this fandom is not only appropriately meta and tongue-in-cheek, but it sort of answers its own question. In the original, one character protests that even though she loves reading, she doesn't want to go to a publishing house to see how the sausage is made, because she's afraid that will ruin books for her. In fandom, in contrast, we can create closure to the narratives we feel deserve better, or critique the assumptions of the original canons, or anything in between, without trying to replace them.