"in Calvino's novel it is only the embedded Reader who does this fully, whose quest for narrative experience produces a linking of textual fragments into a larger narrative structure that is no Aristotelian unity, to be sure, but is not quite random or arbitrary either. The real reader of the novel remains, in a more or less traditional way, controlled by the physical sequence of words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, and chapters. And, of course, Calvino does provide us with a perhaps facile, definitely tongue-in-cheek, somewhat abrupt, 'Aristotelian' closure at the end" (63).
-- Silvio Gaggi, From Text to Hypertext (U Penn 1997)