Tony Ardizzone, a native of Chicago, is the author of five previous books of fiction, including Heart of the Order and Larabi's Ox: Stories of Morocco. His work has received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Ficiton, the Pushcart Prize, the Friends of Literature's Chicago Foundation Award for Fiction, and the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, among other honors.
"The author must have sat at the knees of beloved grandmothers and aunts to learn these tales....At the end we feel we've sat at the table of a family that has lived the transformation of the Old World into the New in every fiber of their bones." --Thomas Simpson, Chicago Tribune "Lusty, whimsical, and reverent...Like tributaries into a slow and relentless river, [the Santuzzus'] stories merge with Old World folk tales, Catholic miracle lore and the darker realities of American history." --Dan Carpenter, The Indianapolis Star "Robust, beguiling...rich with fable and folklore and religion." --Publishers Weekly "Fascinating...reads as if told by ghosts around an open fire." --Library Journal
"The author must have sat at the knees of beloved grandmothers and aunts to learn these tales....At the end we feel we've sat at the table of a family that has lived the transformation of the Old World into the New in every fiber of their bones." --Thomas Simpson, Chicago Tribune "Lusty, whimsical, and reverent...Like tributaries into a slow and relentless river, [the Santuzzus'] stories merge with Old World folk tales, Catholic miracle lore and the darker realities of American history." --Dan Carpenter, The Indianapolis Star "Robust, beguiling...rich with fable and folklore and religion." --Publishers Weekly "Fascinating...reads as if told by ghosts around an open fire." --Library Journal
Gathered around a metaphorical campfire, the members of the extended Girgenti clan take turns regaling us in this robust, beguiling novel about family and the immigrant experience in the first half of the 20th century. Ardizzone, the author of two previous novels (Heart of the Order, etc.) and a story collection (Taking It Home: Stories from the Neighborhood), doesn't cleave to conventional narrative hereÄeach chapter is a distinct vignette, with occasional overlaps as the characters intersectÄso he depends instead on exquisite language and anecdotal charm to propel the narrative. The cumulative effect is of a kind of Sicilian Canterbury Tales, rich with fable and folklore and religion even as it traces a familiar pattern of immigrants struggling to survive in a hostile new world. One by one Papa Santuzzu sends his seven children off to "La Merica," while he remains in Sicily with his dead wife and his hard patch of garden dirt. But the gesture, intended to save his family from a life of poverty, inevitably drives them apart; in America, the siblings scatter from coast to coast and reunite only when fate and an unexpected funeral pull them back together. The novel, then, becomes a eulogy for a lost culture. Ardizzone nods to traditional immigrant tales: scenes of Ellis Island, sweatshops and brutal discrimination at the hands of the upper class. But the book's lasting power derives less from its pointed, perfunctory snapshots than from Ardizzone's sharp metaphors: when the police shoot a striking worker, for instance, she makes "a bird's nest of her thin, white fingers" to cover her wound; for most readers, that bird's nest will linger longer than the unjust death. Agent, Kit Ward. (July) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
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