Inverno
A Novel
-
-
4.0 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
This brilliantly original novel by Cynthia Zarin, 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 startling. It asks, How does love make and unmake a life?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Zarin (Orbit) offers a sly and beguiling love story doubling as a meditation on the nature of time. Caroline, a middle-aged mother of two, stands in Central Park on a snowy evening, waiting for a call on her cellphone from her old love Alastair. Interspersed with this waiting, which takes up the bulk of the present-day narrative, are scenes of Caroline at different ages: as a child, an older mother at some point in the future, and a 20-something woman falling in love with Alastair. The novel slips through time and space at a sometimes dizzying pace, exploring the avenues of memory and desire in Caroline's mind beneath her snow-dusted fox-fur hat. The omniscient narrator occasionally zooms out to explore questions about the identity and meaning of a fictional character like Caroline, and what her story can offer to readers. Though Zarin gets off to a slow start—readers familiar with the plot of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" or the workings of a rotary phone might be tempted to skip passages that describe such things at length—she speeds up soon enough to match the quickness of Caroline's inner life. This is an ambiguous and often lovely exploration of the limits of love and the unlimited scope of memory and imagination.
