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.
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Pressestimmen
"Lyrical...Bold...Beautiful."
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The Boston Globe "Exquisitely rendered...Does not open up so much as catch and slowly reel in."
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Los Angeles Times "Rhapsodic...Unflinching...Masterful...a novel unafraid to split into the breastplate of humankind and aim a floodlight at the demons dancing there."
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Southern Review "Engulfing. Entangled. Fate-laden. Flinty."
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Esquire "Precise yet inventive...[Scibona] fleshes out a scrabbling immigrant Cleveland."
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The American Book Review "Like no other contemporary writer...A concordance of the immigrant experience from the beautiful to the brutal and everything in between."
-ZZ Packer, author of
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere "Possibly the only novel I've ever read that legitimately deserves to be called Bellovian. And that's no small claim."
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Kenyon Review "Breathtaking...Think not only Faulkner, but also T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce."
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Cleveland Plain Dealer
