The postmodernist narrative, in the form of a frame story, is about the reader trying to read a book called If on a winter's night a traveler.

These chapters concern the reader's adventures in reading Italo Calvino's novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

The second-person narrative passages develop into a fairly cohesive novel that puts its two protagonists on the track of an international book-fraud conspiracy, a mischievous translator, a reclusive novelist haunted by advertisers who wish to embed products in his stories and programmers who demand to let a computer generate the conclusion to his unfinished novels, a collapsing publishing house, and several repressive governments.

When the titles of the fragmentary fictions are read in order—as they are by a character near the end of the narrative—they form a sentence: "If on a winter's night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave— What story down there awaits its end?—he asks, anxious to hear the story.

Other themes include the subjectivity of meaning, the relationship between fiction and life, what makes an ideal reader and author, and authorial originality.

As Calvino concludes the alleged, fictional encyclopedia entry concerning Cimmeria: "In successive territorial divisions between her powerful neighbors the young nation was soon erased from the map; the autochthonous population was dispersed; Cimmerian language and culture had no development".

There are a number of minor characters that appear at various points in the story including Lotaria (Ludmilla's sister), Ermes Marana (a translation scammer), and Silas Flannery (an author).

In a 1985 interview with Gregory Lucente, Calvino stated If on a winter's night a traveler was "clearly" influenced by the writings of Vladimir Nabokov.

[5] In a letter written to critic Lucio Lombardo Radice dated November 13, 1979 (published in Italo Calvino: letters, 1941–1985), Calvino mentions Mikhail Bulgakov, Yasunari Kawabata, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Juan Rulfo, José María Arguedas, Jorge Luis Borges and G. K. Chesterton as having influenced, in various ways, the narrative style of the ten stories that comprise the book.

[13] In the version 2.0 of the game Wuthering Waves Carlotta Montelli's companion quest "If on a rainy night a family" references the book.