The End
| The End | |
| Salvatore Scibona | |
| Penguin (2009) | |
| Rating: | ★★★★☆ |
| Tags: | Fiction, Literary |
| Fictionttt Literaryttt |
An incredible debut and National Book Award-nominated novel?it?s ?
Memento
meets
Augie March
. Didion meets Hitchcock? (
Esquire
).
It is August 15, 1953, the day of a boisterous and unwieldy street carnival in Elephant Park, an Italian immigrant enclave in northern Ohio. As the festivities reach a riotous pitch and billow into the streets, five members of the community labor under the weight of a terrible secret. As these floundering souls collide, one day of calamity and consequence sheds light on a half century of their struggles, their follies, and their pride. And slowly, it becomes clear that buried deep in the hearts of these five exquisitely drawn characters is the long-silenced truth about the crime that twisted each of their worlds.
Cast against the racial, spiritual, and moral tension that has given rise to modern America, this first novel exhumes the secrets lurking in the darkened crevices of the soul of our country. Inventive, explosive, and revelatory,
The End
introduces Salvatore Scibona as an important new voice in American fiction.
**
Starred Review. The Italian immigrants in this exceptional debut collide and collapse in a polyphonic narrative that is part novel, part epic prose poem spanning the first half of the 20th century. Costanza Marini, a Cleveland widow who performs abortions of such a high grade that clinicians come take stock of her methods, has decided, among other aspirations, to save Lina, her young seamstress protégée and heiress, from spinsterhood. Intersecting sporadically with the machinations of Mrs. Marini during the sweltering feast of the Assumption is Rocco, the baker of the Italian community of Elephant Park, who is poised to leave his parochial Midwestern enclave for the first time to seek out his lost family. In doing so, he must face America and eventually ends up adrift near the Canadian border while looking for "the New Jersey." Rocco, whose fate, regrettably, is never explicated, inhabits (and narrates) the novel's radiant beginning and is emblematic of both Scibona's calibrated precision and the story's potent humanity. This ravenous prose offers its share of challenges, but Scibona's portrayal of the lost world of Elephant Park is a literary tour de force.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
As always, Assumption Day is celebrated with a street carnival in Cleveland’s Elephant Park neighborhood, home to a group of struggling Italian immigrants. A crowd has gathered outside Rocco’s Bakery, but for the first time, the shop is closed. One of this lonely, toiling man’s three sons has been killed in Korea, and Rocco is about to embark on a nearly hallucinogenic journey. So begins this portentous, labyrinthine debut novel of the epic search for home and the promise of a better future. Scibona loops back to 1913 to tell Rocco’s story and those of his neighbors, among them a widow who performs abortions in her cellar, a self-negating seamstress, and a history-buff jeweler. Brooding, intermittently gorgeous, bittersweet, and devastating, Scibona’s storm-cloud novel revolves around a murder and twists together intense inner monologues and heartbreaking descriptions of smothering poverty and thankless labor, fractured families, and stabbing revelations of prejudice and racism. Add a ghost and subtle allusions to the radical changes industrialization wrought, and this is one loaded novel about twentieth-century-America’s growing pains. --Donna Seaman
The End
Salvatore Scibona
Penguin (2009)
Rating: ★★★★☆
Tags: Fiction, Literary
Fictionttt Literaryttt
An incredible debut and National Book Award-nominated novel?it?s ?
Memento
meets
Augie March
. Didion meets Hitchcock? (
Esquire
).
It is August 15, 1953, the day of a boisterous and unwieldy street carnival in Elephant Park, an Italian immigrant enclave in northern Ohio. As the festivities reach a riotous pitch and billow into the streets, five members of the community labor under the weight of a terrible secret. As these floundering souls collide, one day of calamity and consequence sheds light on a half century of their struggles, their follies, and their pride. And slowly, it becomes clear that buried deep in the hearts of these five exquisitely drawn characters is the long-silenced truth about the crime that twisted each of their worlds.
Cast against the racial, spiritual, and moral tension that has given rise to modern America, this first novel exhumes the secrets lurking in the darkened crevices of the soul of our country. Inventive, explosive, and revelatory,
The End
introduces Salvatore Scibona as an important new voice in American fiction.
**
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The Italian immigrants in this exceptional debut collide and collapse in a polyphonic narrative that is part novel, part epic prose poem spanning the first half of the 20th century. Costanza Marini, a Cleveland widow who performs abortions of such a high grade that clinicians come take stock of her methods, has decided, among other aspirations, to save Lina, her young seamstress protégée and heiress, from spinsterhood. Intersecting sporadically with the machinations of Mrs. Marini during the sweltering feast of the Assumption is Rocco, the baker of the Italian community of Elephant Park, who is poised to leave his parochial Midwestern enclave for the first time to seek out his lost family. In doing so, he must face America and eventually ends up adrift near the Canadian border while looking for "the New Jersey." Rocco, whose fate, regrettably, is never explicated, inhabits (and narrates) the novel's radiant beginning and is emblematic of both Scibona's calibrated precision and the story's potent humanity. This ravenous prose offers its share of challenges, but Scibona's portrayal of the lost world of Elephant Park is a literary tour de force.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
As always, Assumption Day is celebrated with a street carnival in Cleveland’s Elephant Park neighborhood, home to a group of struggling Italian immigrants. A crowd has gathered outside Rocco’s Bakery, but for the first time, the shop is closed. One of this lonely, toiling man’s three sons has been killed in Korea, and Rocco is about to embark on a nearly hallucinogenic journey. So begins this portentous, labyrinthine debut novel of the epic search for home and the promise of a better future. Scibona loops back to 1913 to tell Rocco’s story and those of his neighbors, among them a widow who performs abortions in her cellar, a self-negating seamstress, and a history-buff jeweler. Brooding, intermittently gorgeous, bittersweet, and devastating, Scibona’s storm-cloud novel revolves around a murder and twists together intense inner monologues and heartbreaking descriptions of smothering poverty and thankless labor, fractured families, and stabbing revelations of prejudice and racism. Add a ghost and subtle allusions to the radical changes industrialization wrought, and this is one loaded novel about twentieth-century-America’s growing pains. --Donna Seaman
The End
Salvatore Scibona
Penguin (2009)
Rating: ★★★★☆
Tags: Fiction, Literary
Fictionttt Literaryttt
An incredible debut and National Book Award-nominated novel?it?s ?
Memento
meets
Augie March
. Didion meets Hitchcock? (
Esquire
).
It is August 15, 1953, the day of a boisterous and unwieldy street carnival in Elephant Park, an Italian immigrant enclave in northern Ohio. As the festivities reach a riotous pitch and billow into the streets, five members of the community labor under the weight of a terrible secret. As these floundering souls collide, one day of calamity and consequence sheds light on a half century of their struggles, their follies, and their pride. And slowly, it becomes clear that buried deep in the hearts of these five exquisitely drawn characters is the long-silenced truth about the crime that twisted each of their worlds.
Cast against the racial, spiritual, and moral tension that has given rise to modern America, this first novel exhumes the secrets lurking in the darkened crevices of the soul of our country. Inventive, explosive, and revelatory,
The End
introduces Salvatore Scibona as an important new voice in American fiction.
**
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The Italian immigrants in this exceptional debut collide and collapse in a polyphonic narrative that is part novel, part epic prose poem spanning the first half of the 20th century. Costanza Marini, a Cleveland widow who performs abortions of such a high grade that clinicians come take stock of her methods, has decided, among other aspirations, to save Lina, her young seamstress protégée and heiress, from spinsterhood. Intersecting sporadically with the machinations of Mrs. Marini during the sweltering feast of the Assumption is Rocco, the baker of the Italian community of Elephant Park, who is poised to leave his parochial Midwestern enclave for the first time to seek out his lost family. In doing so, he must face America and eventually ends up adrift near the Canadian border while looking for "the New Jersey." Rocco, whose fate, regrettably, is never explicated, inhabits (and narrates) the novel's radiant beginning and is emblematic of both Scibona's calibrated precision and the story's potent humanity. This ravenous prose offers its share of challenges, but Scibona's portrayal of the lost world of Elephant Park is a literary tour de force.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
As always, Assumption Day is celebrated with a street carnival in Cleveland’s Elephant Park neighborhood, home to a group of struggling Italian immigrants. A crowd has gathered outside Rocco’s Bakery, but for the first time, the shop is closed. One of this lonely, toiling man’s three sons has been killed in Korea, and Rocco is about to embark on a nearly hallucinogenic journey. So begins this portentous, labyrinthine debut novel of the epic search for home and the promise of a better future. Scibona loops back to 1913 to tell Rocco’s story and those of his neighbors, among them a widow who performs abortions in her cellar, a self-negating seamstress, and a history-buff jeweler. Brooding, intermittently gorgeous, bittersweet, and devastating, Scibona’s storm-cloud novel revolves around a murder and twists together intense inner monologues and heartbreaking descriptions of smothering poverty and thankless labor, fractured families, and stabbing revelations of prejudice and racism. Add a ghost and subtle allusions to the radical changes industrialization wrought, and this is one loaded novel about twentieth-century-America’s growing pains. --Donna Seaman
Table of Contents
PART ONE - I Know That My Redeemer Lives 1913 - 1953
PART TWO - All the Daughters of Musick Shall Be Brought Low 1928 - 1936