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A daring, heartbreaking novel, Inverno is the book that J. D. Salinger's “Franny Glass” might have written a few decades into her adulthood.
Caroline waited for fifteen minutes in the snow. After a little time had passed, she was simply waiting to see what would happen. It was entirely possible he would not come. If he did not come, she would be in a different story than the one she had imagined, but it was possible, she knew, to imagine anything.
Inverno is a love story that stretches across decades. Inverno is also the story of Caroline, waiting in Central Park, in a snowstorm, for her phone to ring, yards from where, thirty years ago, Alastair, as a boy, hid in the trees. Will he call? Won't he? The story moves the way the mind does: years flash by in an instant, now we are in the perilous world of fairy tale, now stranded anew in childhood, with its sorrows and harsh words. Ever-present are the complicated negotiations of the heart.
How does love make and unmake a life? This startling and brilliantly original novel by Cynthia Zarin, the author of “An Enlarged Heart”, is a kaleidoscope in which the past and the present shatter. Elliptical and inventive in the mode of Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, Inverno is miraculous and startlingly true.
Caroline waited for fifteen minutes in the snow. After a little time had passed, she was simply waiting to see what would happen. It was entirely possible he would not come. If he did not come, she would be in a different story than the one she had imagined, but it was possible, she knew, to imagine anything.
Inverno is a love story that stretches across decades. Inverno is also the story of Caroline, waiting in Central Park, in a snowstorm, for her phone to ring, yards from where, thirty years ago, Alastair, as a boy, hid in the trees. Will he call? Won't he? The story moves the way the mind does: years flash by in an instant, now we are in the perilous world of fairy tale, now stranded anew in childhood, with its sorrows and harsh words. Ever-present are the complicated negotiations of the heart.
How does love make and unmake a life? This startling and brilliantly original novel by Cynthia Zarin, the author of “An Enlarged Heart”, is a kaleidoscope in which the past and the present shatter. Elliptical and inventive in the mode of Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, Inverno is miraculous and startlingly true.
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Reviews
"I would in fact recommend this book to any reader for whom a chief pleasure to be found in literature is beautiful sentences. The elegance and incantatory power of Zarin's prose, along with her virtuosity at observation, are undeniable . . . Love and time. Each is commonly said to have the power to heal, but Inverno is all about that other power they share: to annihilate . . . To see the chaos of
Sigrid Nunez, New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
"A beautiful, tricky, compressed gem of a book that seems determined to upend your expectations of it . . . Though Inverno is Zarin's first novel, it carries the grace and intellectual heft of her decades as a poet . . . Its stream-of-consciousness narration evokes Virginia Woolf or Italo Calvino."
Mark Athitakis, The Washington Post