Customer Reviews

The End

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

"The End" is an interesting book, very much worth reading. It also requires a patient reader. It is the story of one day, Assumption Day, August 15, 1953, in Elephant Park, a section of Cleveland settled by Italian immigrants. However, the narrative structure is not chronological; it moves backward and forward in time and ends with a chapter entitled "The Present Moment: 1915." The lives of characters overlap, often in ways that at first are not entirely clear. The inside flap of the cover even offers an explanation of the novel's structure by appending a passage from the novel itself: "Distant events have thrown us into long, comet-like orbits, far from our origins, bur eventually we will circle back on people whose lives preceded and gave rise to our own." The first 65 pages belong to the baker, Rocco LaGrassa, but he then disappears from the story for a long time. Two chapters are devoted to a mystery involving a jeweler. The elderly woman at the center of the book, Costanza Marini, is the most complex character, but even she cannot be fully understood until the novel's end.

Scibona's depiction of an immigrant community in flux, under pressures arising from racial conflict, changing social and cultural mores, and differences between first and second generation perspectives is lyrical, poetical. As a reader, you feel that you have been transported to times and places now lost. However, "The End" is not a book to pick up and put down too many times; if your reading is interrupted by the usual interference (work, weariness, lack of time) you may find yourself repeatedly going back a few pages to pick up the narrative thread. The effect of reading "The End" is a bit like listening to music; when you remove your bookmark and begin to read, you may have to wait a little (as you read) before you can hear the melody line again.

Scibona's first book made me realize what a lazy reader I've become. I began this one in my usual fashion, fully intending to skim it, skipping the dull details and anticipated awkward prose, just to see what this new author had to offer. Somewhere in his first paragraph, I found myself emitting a loud, mental "WHOA!" and slowed down to savor the prose (even re-reading some passages!), the unique characters, the dark and too-accurate humor. "The cowl makes the monk," Scibona writes.

"Radiant debut," indeed.

My God, the sentences of Signore Scibona! Constructions hard-headed yet lovely, precise yet inventive: "Night, for children, was more a place than a time." And: "...Lina was a child. She lacked the natural cruelty that a conversance with the marital act encouraged one to refine." And: "The city was a mammoth trash heap -- even the lake was brown -- but it was an honorable place. It put pretty to one side." THE END is a debut novel -- a runner-up for the current Nat'l Book Award -- and it has a lot more where that came from. Another GR guy could pluck a handful of different yet equally delicious turns of phrase. All combine 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. Physical description, too, proves on the money and felicitous. As for plot, hmm, the novel's central date falls in August, 1953, a moment when "Europe was happening, right here, and it didn't fit." Didn't fit any longer, that is: on this day in Scibona's Italian-American Cleveland begins the decay that hit all inner cities during that era, largely because the "moolies"-- the African Americans -- start moving in. Scibona's opening chapters hinge on an incident in which the a miracle-seeking Ital-Am throng, out for a parade behind a statue of the Madonna, threatens to erupt in a race riot. A few dancing blacks disrupt the celebration. That disruption, as the novel goes on, passes through the prism of four or five different vantage points. The result is a metropolitan oratorio, with an bristling combination of wit and pathos, alive throughout with a brio delivered out of the side of the mouth. THE END has the earmarks of a masterpiece we'll be reading long after our own neighborhoods shuffle off this grease-stained coil.

This novel clearly polarizes readers. I'm with the hated-it group. Like other reviewers, I had difficulty finishing the book and wish that I had not wasted time doing so. The lack of continuity of time worried me, but ny inability to get a handle on most of the characters was even more of a worry. Some of the prose has a lyrical flow to it, but I can think of nothing else positive to record.

I'm currently reading this book now. It's like a strong but cinnamon-flavored espresso that at first seems too bitter but which keeps you sipping, until you realize it's one of the best cups of coffee you've ever had the privilege of imbibing. So you sip, and you dip, and you keep wanting more, and you know that when the bottom of the cup is spied you'll be missing it, wanting another, but having to wait, yes, for possibly or not possibly a year or more for the creation of a brilliant tastemento! Honors, please, for the elegant author and his strange (inimitable I'm sure) divertissement.

Scibona writes the way writers hope to write, and readers hope to read (at least for me). A kind of proof that we carry all our sleeping thoughts with us as we form waking thoughts, and that their incubation grows such things as dahlias and maple trees, faith and fungi and Venus fly traps. A complex story, not for entertainment only. I liked the Mrs. Marini character most of all for her brave and defiant actions.

and I didn't get one. There wasn't one character I could connect with in any way. I had absolutely no feelings about the people or the story line. It was just a lot of uninteresting drivel. It took all the discipline I could muster up to finish the book.

I found this book painful to read. Several times I thought about giving it up. If you are considering this book, I would read the first chapter before purchasing to see if the style is to your liking.

Our book club (7 of us) were unanimous. In the words of one of our members, " The end didn't come quickly enough." The reviewer who said to read a few pages before purchasing was excellent advice. We wish we had taken such advice.

In 1953 in the Italian neighbored Elephant Park in Ohio, the residents enjoy the annual August Feast of the Assumption. "Unwifed" and "Un-children" baker Rocco cannot accept his family left him; in fact he rejects the military informing him his son died in action in Korea. He expects every one of them to come home shortly.

The workaholic jeweler with nothing else in his life, the bone weary seamstress, the runaway teen, and the acrimonies elderly abortion doctor attend the Feast. They are just as lost as the baker is as they cannot accept desertion although each in some way has been affected by dissimilation. In fact in a macabre way they have each other as they and others unite when a few blacks try to enjoy the festivities but are not just unwelcome but hostilities turn violent with The End justifying the means.

This not a simple linear historical tale that goes from one point to the next until the end is reached; instead the story line is convoluted and difficult to follow, but once the reader adapts, he or she will appreciate a deep look into the window of the souls. A sort of Eleanor Rigby starring in the Outcast of Poker Flats; The End is a profound tale of what makes a community as the coming together is not necessarily positive. Not for everyone, Salvatore Scibona provides to his audience a resonating character study in which each of the key cast members find their respective past converge on a hot humid August 15 1953, a day of infamy for the lost residents of Elephant Park

Harriet Klausner