If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler is a deeply metafictional work. [See first few pages here or the wikipedia entry here] At first, the narrator seems to be addressing “you” personally, as “you” begin to read the titular work, which seems to be some spy novel. However, the novel is less told, rather than the process of reading the novel is. In other words, throughout the this opening (and the many later openings of abortive, unfinished novels throughout the text), the narration is heavily reflective upon itself. (We hear such things as “the sentences suggest” etc) However, unfortunately for the Reader (who is not exactly us, especially given that I am personally female, and the Reader is male, although later there is a chapter where the second Reader, Ludmilla, is addressed), there is a problem with the book and the rest of the pages are blank, so the Reader goes back to the bookstore to find another book, where he is unfortunately interrupted again, and is unable to complete his reading. A strange tale, interrupted by various beginnings of books, ensues, in which Ludmilla (the ideal reader?), whom the Reader falls in love with, her ideologue sister Lotaria, the blocked writer Silas Flannery, who may or may not be collaborating with Ermes Marana, the spurned ex of Ludmilla, who attempts to make the enterprise of fiction reading a sham by orchestrating various conspiracies to create apocryphal, misattributed, or forged novels, weave in and out of the book. In any case, unlike many experimental novels, which are alienating, and much worse, unentertaining, this book succeeds at holding one’s attention through the interrupted narrative(s).
[Yes, this is the first extended work in which the author has used the second person present throughout the work. It works here because there's a clear justification, in addressing a reader, in a conversation between the construct of the Reader, to differentiate it from the narrated world of the books, which are generally narrated fairly conventionally. Too often I see people trying narrative tricks in works that are simply too conventional for such things to be grounded well. ]
Quotes which I liked: