I've just finished reading If on a winter's night a traveller, by Italo Calvino.

And what, a book. Astonishing; deeply self-consious, -reflexive and -obsessed. Goodness, Calvino is a fantastic linguist, all too aware that his writing is translated into English the world over so that people can read his novels; it's obsessed with who might be reading it, what kind of person might be reading his words, and what they make of them, what they bring to them, what they expect from them, and from him, as the author.

I love this kind of stuff. It switches from first person to third person to second person, from present tense to past tense, from one space to another, from one time to another still, all with one brush-stroke, with one turn, in the same sentence. It's so densely obsessed with its own literary fabrication, it's almost anti-imagery, as if to form images in the mind when reading a novel is to relate it to a possible cinematic or painterly adaptation, and he doesn't want that at all; he makes you conscious from the very start to the very finish that you are not only reading a novel, but you are reading his novel.

Questions of authorship, readership, reality, the text as a mirror, the text as written by one person, the text as written by everybody at the same time, the text as one chapter in a bookshop full of texts; how meaning is fabricated, how interpretation is formed. It's like a very creative, elongated essay of literary criticism, and a very convincing and thrilling one at that. I've never read anything quite like it.

You must read it soon, if this brief "synopsis" gets your juices flowing.