Customer Reviews

Come Back to Sorrento

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This is an extremely well written book. It is the story of a housewife and the local high school Music teacher. Both of whom live in their pasts, which they have embellished to the point of unrecognition. This is what binds them together as they create their "salon". I love Dawn Powell and her real forte is creating these amazing character studies that are both hilarious and pathetic. I would highly recommend this book and any other of Dawn Powell's works

This book has been well-summarized by the other reviewers. I can only second their recommendations and say that this book is spellbindingly written and contains two extended passages (I will leave it to other readers to find their own favorite parts)that are among the most brilliant writing I have ever encountered. Just be warned that it will break your heart. Now if only Steerforth would reissue her "Story of a Country Boy" which I just found an ancient copy of and which is just as good...

Dawn Powell's "Come Back to Sorrento", was published in 1932 under the title "The Tenth Moon" to little notice from critics or from the public. But this poignant, mostly understated novel set in a drab midwestern town called Dell River is a gem.

The two main characters in the book are Connie Benjamin and Blaine Decker. When we meet Connie as a housewife in her mid-thirties, she is leading a life she finds sterile and barren with her husband Gus, a cobbler, and her two adolescent daughters. As a young woman, Connie had visions of a career as an opera singer, even though this ambition seemed to be based on little more than a commendation of her voice by a famous teacher. Connie also has a past in which she ran off with a young man named Tony who did acrobatics with a circus. Tony aboandoned her, and Connie lives with dreams of a singing career that perhaps could have been and with faded memories of Tony.

Blaine Decker comes to Dell River as the high school music teacher. He rents a small apartment above Gus Decker's shoe repair shop. Decker is a pianist by training (with small hands) who likewise has never had the artistic success of which he dreams. He spent his early years in Europe during which time he was a friend of a writer, Starr Donnell, who had written, as far as Decker knows, one novel. Powell hints throughout the novel at Decker's repressed homosexuality.

The novel explores the relationship that develops between Connie and Blaine. With their shared love of music and their broken, and probably illusory dreams, they feel stifled by the small town of Dell River. They share confidences with each other and at the same time quarrel severely with each other over their respective failures to pursue their dreams. The relationship is at bottom frustrating and unconsummated. It never becomes sexual.

There are wonderful pictures in this book of music and its capacity to bring meaning to life. The seriousness with which Powell discusses the pursuit of classical music in this work contrasts markedly with her picture of frivolous people and activities in her subsequent satirical New York novels. Powell also shows how music can be a means by which people evade their own selves and their own reality. There are also good depictions in the book of life in a small town, particularly those people who teach in High Schools, and of many secondary characters.

As do Powell's latter works, this book contrasts life in a small town with life in the cosmopolitian city, here represented by Paris more than by New York. But there is a certain inward focus to this book which is not shared by her latter satirical pictures of New York. The characters here are limited by Dell River and its environs, but their problems and discontents lie within themselves, in their lack of self-knowledge, and in their failed dreams. The book lacks the sharp cynicism of the latter novels but features instead reflectiveness and sadness.

Powell's writing style in this novel is rather flatter than in her subsequent works but it fits the atmosphere of Dell River that she conveys. There are several moments in the novel or lyricism and intensity.

This probably is not a novel that will ever enjoy wide readership. But it is rare and a treasure.

Here I am again, the Web's biggest Dawn Powell fan. This is a do not miss novel.The story of a lonely housewife, and her unlikely friendship with the High School music teacher,both of whom imagine themselves to be better than what they really are, is so understandable. It is both touching and pathetic, but, as usual, it is the way Dawn Powell writes that makes this story so unforgettable. This is one of her very best works in my humble opinion. I highly recommend this novel.

I have been reading the books in the Library of America series over the past four years, and Dawn Powell's Dance Night was one of my favorites. I approached Come Back to Sorrento with very positive expectations, even though I had read that a ) Dance Night was very different from most of Powell's other novels, and b) Powell herself felt Dance Night was her finest work.

I love novels about life in small, undistinguished Midwestern towns, and I certainly found this novel enjoyable and compelling if not gripping throughout. Its characters are simply drawn, to the point of almost being strange, one-dimensional caricatures. Some of the twists of the plot are unlikely in the extreme.

In this sad little town, a self-isolated, fanciful married woman and a shabby, comically odd, but (self-proclaimed) worldly and cultured high school music director meet. A profound intellectual friendship develops between them. Both supposedly had near-brushes with success in the world of culture and music, but fate (or their own personalities and shortcomings) deprived them of it, leaving them to their current boring, mundane, almost pointless lives.

The relationship between the two odd people becomes their oasis, as they feel superior to all the other townspeople, and think constantly of the past (other places and times, anything but here and now) and what could have been and also intimate vaguely about a renewed (but unlikely) future.

The woman's stolid German husband, uncommunicative to the extreme, but a "good provider", tolerates this friendship. Frequent meetings between Professor Decker and Connie Benjamin (the wife), as well as Louisa (an intellectually inclined young female teacher) occur at Connie's house. Decker and Connie become obsessed with, and highly dependent upon, each other and the intellectual fantasy world they create.

This is not a romance in the normal sense, as there is little physical involvement between the two, or desire for it (except perhaps at a highly suppressed inner level). Their relationship is touching and in a way very understandable given their artistic temperaments and the boring world that surrounds them....

Then some things occur that throw their lives and their precious relationship into jeopardy. This is really a good book, almost like a fable or a fairy tale -- so simple that it is not realistic, but the points that Powell wants to make are thus all the clearer. I rarely give 5 stars, so my 4 stars has to be taken in that context.