It is possible that I’m learning more from this one novel about writing than in all else, or perhaps it is what I have learned that is recognizable in it.
The main story, that is, the one that is continuous and is marked by chapter numbering as sequential, is of two readers who seek out the mystery behind a book entitled "If on a winter’s night a traveler" since it is never contiguous but rather ends abruptly to begin a new story to frustrate the readers. This main story is written in the second person point of view (you) and involves another reader (Other Reader, or Ludmilla) whom ‘you’ are interested in as a romantic possibility.
But watch this, in Chapter 7:
We live in a uniform civilization, within well-defined cultural models: furnishings, decorative elements, blankets, record player have been chosen among a certain number of given possibilities. What can they reveal to you about what she is really like?
What are you like, Other Reader? It is time for this book in the second person to address itself no longer to a general male you, perhaps brother and double of a hypocrite I, but directly to you who appeared already in the second chapter as the Third Person necessary for the novel to be a novel, for something to happen between that male Second Person and the female Third, for something to take form, develop, or deteriorate according to the phases of human events. (p. 141)
In the first paragraph, we have the original and continuous Second Person waiting for the Other Reader (Ludmilla) in her apartment. There is more here, I believe, than a reference to the expected versus the unexpected in Calvino’s "uniform civilization." I think that is made clearer by the second paragraph which switches the Second Person to being the Other Reader (Ludmilla). Calvino, I think, is poking fun at the norms not of society in general, but specifically at what is accepted as literary trend and propriety. In the second paragraph above, he states "necessary for the novel to be a novel…" Necessary according to whom? He continues:
Or, rather, to follow the mental models through which we attribute to human events the meanings that allow them to be lived.
Wow.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology