The End (2 page)

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

The Forest Runner

PART THREE - Bogus 1952 - 1953

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

The Forest Runner

PART FOUR - Cleveland 1953

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

PART FIVE - The Present Moment 1915

Chapter 22

Acknowledgements

Praise for
The End

“Anyone with family knows by instinct that what physicists say is true: Time’s arrow doesn’t fly straight. Glance at your father, and you can sometimes glimpse the future. Gaze at your niece or nephew and there—in their smiles, their honking guffaws—is your childhood. . . . Salvatore Scibona brilliantly captures how this time warp lurks at the center of family life. Set in Elephant Park, Cleveland, on an August day in 1953, the book, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, brilliantly shows how even immigration cannot sever the looping ties of blood.”

—The Boston Globe

“Set in an exquisitely rendered Italian immigrant community in early twentieth century Ohio and does not open up so much as catch and slowly reel in . . . The title itself points overtly to the novel’s heart: The final chapters carry more than their share of emotional heft.”

—Los Angeles Times

“Engulfing. Entangled. Fate-laden. Flinty. Dry-eyed.
Memento
meets
Augie March.
Didion meets Hitchcock. Serpentine. Alien. American. Ohioan. McCarthyite (Cormac). Bellowed (Saul).”

—Esquire

“Rhapsodic and interior, inventive in its language and structure, and unflinching in its portrayal of the desolation and disenchantment that afflicts low-luck citizens. . . . Scibona has shaped a searing portrait of an entire Ohio community much like Sherwood Anderson’s
Winesburg,
although Elephant Park is a more menacing locale than Anderson’s middle-class would-be utopia. . . . Scibona excels at dialogue, and not the hard-boiled breed of banter that wins Richard Price and Elmore Leonard so much praise, but dialogue as Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov, and Samuel Beckett understood it: verbal interaction is for dramatizing confusion, for revealing the individual mindscape of the character speaking, and not for advancement of plot or the summing up of events. . . . Scibona has crafted a masterful novel of serious consequence, a novel unafraid to split into the breastplate of humankind and aim a floodlight at the demons dancing there. If the poetic truths and dark spiritual scope of this novel disconcert you, fine. But they will also remind you that the novel is thriving.”

—The Southern Review

“
The End
is a throwback modernist novel. Scibona’s subject is the meaning of place, time, consciousness, memory and, above all, language. Think not only Faulkner, but also T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce.”

—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A masterful novel set amid racial upheaval in 1950s America during the flight of second-generation immigrants from their once-necessary ghettos. Full of wisdom, consequence, and grace, Salvatore Scibona’s radiant debut brims with the promise of a remarkable literary career, of which
The End
is only the beginning.”

—Annie Dillard, author of
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
and
The Maytrees

“Like no other contemporary writer, Salvatore Scibona is heir to Saul Bellow, Graham Greene, and Virginia Woolf, and his masterful novel stands as proof of it—a concordance of the immigrant experience from the beautiful to the brutal and everything in between. Each character stands both illuminated like a saint and obscured in shadows of past lives, debts, and secrets. In
The End
all the ‘beautiful caves’ of the characters’ pasts connect, and ‘each comes to daylight at the present moment’ in ways that leave one touched, surprised and amazed.”

—ZZ Packer, author of
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

“Hard-headed yet lovely, precise yet inventive . . . delicious turns of phrase, combining skewed aphorism, urbanity with all the senses open, Roman Catholic arcana and Southern Italian superstition, and plain old perspicuity about the human animal as it ages and changes . . . ZZ Packer makes the daunting comparison to Saul Bellow—daunting, yet notably fitting. Granted,
The End
isn’t set in Chicago, where Bellow drew his inspiration. It’s Cleveland for Scibona, but he fleshes out a scrabbling immigrant Cleveland, an Italian-American neighborhood he calls ‘Elephant Park.’ Both Augie March and his author would recognize the place, and not for nothing does the new novel’s central date fall in 1953, the year that Augie’s
Adventures
saw print. Scibona knows the big shoulders on which he’s set up his own tuner, the better to bring in his own metropolitan oratorio.”

—American Book Review

“
The End
is an ambitious book in both scope and structure. Scibona does a remarkable job of summoning a time and place not only through the exactitude of his descriptions but by so convincingly inhabiting the interior worlds of his many characters, whose pathos he manages to get right down into the grammar of the sentences that compose them. Add to this the overall verve and playfulness of the language here and it reminds one of the Wandering Rocks chapter of Joyce’s
Ulysses
: one city’s compendium of souls offered up to the reader for companionship by the force of a writer’s imagination.”

—Adam Haslett, author of
You Are Not a Stranger Here

“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 twentieth century. Radiant . . . ravenous prose . . . Scibona’s portrayal of the lost world of Elephant Park is a literary tour de force.”

—Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

“Salvatore Scibona opens his debut novel,
The End
, with a spectacular sentence that describes one of the book ’s key characters in impressively complete detail. By the time the period arrives and the reader gets to take a full breath, the hook has been set. A page and a half later, Scibona . . . devastates the reader with a simple, five-word sentence. Thought he was good on the first page? Wait until he pulls the rug out from under you on the third . . . The reader . . . desire[s] that the book might not end at all.”

—Cedar Rapids Gazette

“Salvatore Scibona has written a ravishing book: radiant, wise, and wonderfully idiosyncratic. It is thrilling to see the immigrant novel reinvented with such originality and deep feeling, where the language catches fire on every page. As much a metaphysical novel as a historical one,
The End
not only follows its searching characters as they travel across countries, states, and city blocks, but also charts hauntingly the journeys of their souls. Their arrival, in the form of this astonishing book, is cause for celebration.”

—Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of
Madeleine Is Sleeping

“Scibona’s prose contains the off-kilter rhythm and startling flourishes of imperfectly acquired English spoken by immigrants, and his narrative is laced with the overheard fragments—revelatory in their incomprehensibility—that James Joyce called ‘epiphanies’ . . . A demanding but rewarding novel.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“A portentous, labyrinthine debut novel of the epic search for home and the promise of a better future . . . Brooding, intermittently gorgeous, bit tersweet, and devastating, Scibona’s storm-cloud novel . . . 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.”

—Booklist

“The author’s intelligence as an observer cannot be denied or ignored. . . . [
The End
] brings new light into the prism of the American novel. . . . This is a novel to reread, to return to many times over. Be prepared to be stunned.”

—Provincetown Arts

“A debut novel of impressive proportions . . . a fascinating story. This is the kind of book in which the reader loses himself because he becomes so much a part of the world he is reading about. . . . The writing is beautiful. The chances seem good that this talented novelist will still be writing major novels in twenty to thirty years.”

—Salt Lake City Desert News

“For all their bombast and near-pathological love of grandiosity, the modernist writers of the early twentieth century are also responsible for some remarkably simple moments of beauty. . . . It’s esteemed company to be in, to be sure, but the central image in Salvatore Scibona’s debut novel,
The End
, is so rich and so unabashedly in the modernist vein that it could be included on that shortlist retroactively. As the book progresses, Scibona pans back to show the entirety of this neighborhood with surgical precision. His characters are lush and wonderfully complex, their secondhand English flecked with a hundred subtle imperfections, and the central tragedy that links these disparate citizens together is nothing short of devastating.
The End
takes one more nod from its modernist predecessors in its perfectly formed architecture, which is on display as much as any plot point. It takes those quietly powerful moments and assembles them into something truly monumental.”

—Georgia Straight
(Vancouver)

“Possibly the only novel I’ve ever read that legitimately deserves to be called Bellovian. And that’s no small claim.”

—The Kenyon Review

“Though wide-ranging in time and place, the scope of this novel isn’t what makes Scibona a fine writer; it’s the perfect timing of his characters.”

—Harvard Review

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