Come Back to Sorrento [Paperback]

Dawn Powell (Author), Tim Page (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1998

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED as The Tenth Moon, Come Back to Sorrento is the second of Powell’s "Ohio novels" to be re-issued in paperback. Here Powell turns her attention to those certain rare souls who have the secret of finding their lives glamorous and themselves magnificent under the most humble conditions. Connie Benjamin, the village shoemaker’s wife, always wanted an operatic career. Blaine Decker, the new high school music teacher, once spent time abroad studying piano. The two are drawn together into a powerful friendship of dependence, each sustaining the other and translating the surface monotony of their lives into drama richer than reality.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Powell is definitely the comeback kid. Her novels were unavailable for years, but now every time one goes out of print, another publisher picks it up for reissue. This set runs the gamut of her career, with Come Back to Sorrento (originally published as The Tenth Moon) representing an early release (1932) and The Golden Spur, her last (LJ 9/15/62). The autobiographical Come Back is the third of Powell's "Ohio Novels" about small-town life, while Spur portrays the tainted, wise-cracking New Yorkers for whom she is known.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

DAWN POWELL, who died in 1965, was the author of fifteen novels.

Product Details

• Paperback: 185 pages
• Publisher: Zoland Books (June 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883642264
• ISBN-13: 978-1883642266
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,168,203 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply gorgeous., October 15, 1999

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Come Back to Sorrento (Paperback)

Only Dawn Powell could create such an intimate, sorrowful portrayal of two thwarted artists in a smug little town that doesn't recognize their intelligence. Very sad, yet gently funny as well. Dawn Powell apparently didn't think this was one of her more successful books. It always amazes me how poorly some artists judge their work for this is one of her best novels. Read it and weep.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A beautifully written, moving tale., January 23, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Come Back to Sorrento (Paperback)

Written in a simple, lyrical style, this novel is a change of pace from Powell's "New York" novels like "The Locusts Have no King." It's about two 30-something people with thwarted artistic ambitions, stuck in a dreary, isolated small town. They struggle to sustain each other emotionally with fantasies of fame, culture and sophistication. Powell's portrayals of her characters are unsentimental and bittersweet, but full of compassion and timeless insights.Also interesting as a period piece, with details of everyday small-town mid-western life and social attitudes circa 1930. A touching story that will make you want to re-read it to savor the nuances.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Highest Art is Life, May 22, 2002

By 

L. Dann "adhdmom" (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Come Back to Sorrento (Paperback)

What a haiku evokes beyond the language, a few words summon a large panorama, Dawn Powell did in this novella. With artful simplicity, the author relates a somewhat comic and somewhat cosmic fable of two lost souls that blend unrealized dreams into reality. Powell writes with the sensitivity of an empath. In the bearly visible twitch, the eye that cannot contact, the unconscious hesitations belie the character's pretense so that the secret is just between Powell and her reader. In the far less precise language of psychiatry, this is termed the "as if" self. This deceptively simple story succeeds as myth for within the doubling up of solitary dreams, their souls sweep the cosmos.

Shards of memories, are picked from the realities that defeated them and together they build a palace of dignity that not only holds at bay, their individual sufferings, but becomes wide enough to bring a muted sort of redemption to others, afflicted with similar destinies.
Through music and desire, (platonic, alone) a middle aged housewife, and a odd and tattered music teacher shake off fate and taste, if briefly, what they had been denied. Woven in the tale, is the past of childhood trauma and rejection, abandonment and 'making do,' that the odd duo become nothing less than extraordinary people who choose happiness and get it. In this it is a morality tale, par excellance.
Anyone who has ever reached out of despair with a rebound of delight, who has taken an old piece of cloth and thrown it in some transforming wrap over their head, or around their waist, as Connie does, remembers that triumph, so rare, but perfect brilliant touch. Suddenly, an old dress, has color and shape, bohemians, they are beyond the ordinary in fashion and finance.

There are no authorial statements here, Powell has her own transformative power, whereby sentences do indeed show, voluminously what she composed sparingly. Her genious for showing human instincts is beyond any of her peers. Perhaps the most stunning is her instinct for understanding that ancient animal survival rule whereby we must hide our wounds and primal sufferings or risk in discovery- annihilation. There is none of the confessional self-absorption that was the legacy of the psychoanalytic fever, that was in its American childhood at the time she wrote the novel.

Anyone who has suffered and not hurt others, is rare indeed. The sublime experience between the two does not rely on inflicting pain upon others, a far more common means of elevating conditions of esteem.
The message, if I may, is in the true artistic gift that they benefitted from, but if spoken, would have broken the spell. They saw the Touilleries in an unweeded garden, the Volga in a brown shallow river, and in the unattractive, uncultured, midwestern town, they found a quaint village to delight in.

The physical conditions of life bore down upon their paradise and yet Connie and Blaine, prevailed, looking we are told through colored pains of glass, bringing the grey, unsympathetic world into prismmatic shimmering color.

It is a love poem to the artistic process that is a gift for life as much as technique with a brush or an instrument or a sentence. This contrasts effectively with her more cynical tales of the corrupted artist and the exploited audience.

A glorious book.