Salvatore Scibona - The End

“Anyone with family knows by instinct that what physicists say is true: Time’s arrow doesn’t fly straight. Glance at your father, and you can sometimes glimpse the future. Gaze at your niece or nephew and there — in their smiles, their honking guffaws — is your childhood. . Salvatore Scibona brilliantly captures how this time warp lurks at the center of family life. Set in Elephant Park, Cleveland, on an August day in 1953, the book, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, brilliantly shows how even immigration cannot sever the looping ties of blood.”

— The Boston Globe

“Set in an exquisitely rendered Italian immigrant community in early twentieth century Ohio and does not open up so much as catch and slowly reel in. . The title itself points overtly to the novel’s heart: The final chapters carry more than their share of emotional heft.”

— Los Angeles Times

“Engulfing. Entangled. Fate-laden. Flinty. Dry-eyed.

Memento

meets

Augie March.

Didion meets Hitchcock. Serpentine. Alien. American. Ohioan. McCarthyite (Cormac). Bellowed (Saul).”

— Esquire

“Rhapsodic and interior, inventive in its language and structure, and unflinching in its portrayal of the desolation and disenchantment that afflicts low-luck citizens. . Scibona has shaped a searing portrait of an entire Ohio community much like Sherwood Anderson’s

Winesburg,

although Elephant Park is a more menacing locale than Anderson’s middle-class would-be utopia. . Scibona excels at dialogue, and not the hard-boiled breed of banter that wins Richard Price and Elmore Leonard so much praise, but dialogue as Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov, and Samuel Beckett understood it: verbal interaction is for dramatizing confusion, for revealing the individual mindscape of the character speaking, and not for advancement of plot or the summing up of events. . Scibona has crafted a masterful novel of serious consequence, a novel unafraid to split into the breastplate of humankind and aim a floodlight at the demons dancing there. If the poetic truths and dark spiritual scope of this novel disconcert you, fine. But they will also remind you that the novel is thriving.”

— The Southern Review

“

The End

is a throwback modernist novel. Scibona’s subject is the meaning of place, time, consciousness, memory and, above all, language. Think not only Faulkner, but also T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce.”

— The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A masterful novel set amid racial upheaval in 1950s America during the flight of second-generation immigrants from their once-necessary ghettos. Full of wisdom, consequence, and grace, Salvatore Scibona’s radiant debut brims with the promise of a remarkable literary career, of which

The End

is only the beginning.”

— Annie Dillard, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and The Maytrees

“Like no other contemporary writer, Salvatore Scibona is heir to Saul Bellow, Graham Greene, and Virginia Woolf, and his masterful novel stands as proof of it — a concordance of the immigrant experience from the beautiful to the brutal and everything in between. Each character stands both illuminated like a saint and obscured in shadows of past lives, debts, and secrets. In

The End

all the ‘beautiful caves’ of the characters’ pasts connect, and ‘each comes to daylight at the present moment’ in ways that leave one touched, surprised and amazed.”

— ZZ Packer, author of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

“Hard-headed yet lovely, precise yet inventive. . delicious turns of phrase, combining 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. . ZZ Packer makes the daunting comparison to Saul Bellow — daunting, yet notably fitting. Granted,

The End

isn’t set in Chicago, where Bellow drew his inspiration. It’s Cleveland for Scibona, but he fleshes out a scrabbling immigrant Cleveland, an Italian-American neighborhood he calls ‘Elephant Park.’ Both Augie March and his author would recognize the place, and not for nothing does the new novel’s central date fall in 1953, the year that Augie’s

Adventures

saw print. Scibona knows the big shoulders on which he’s set up his own tuner, the better to bring in his own metropolitan oratorio.”

— American Book Review

“

The End

is an ambitious book in both scope and structure. Scibona does a remarkable job of summoning a time and place not only through the exactitude of his descriptions but by so convincingly inhabiting the interior worlds of his many characters, whose pathos he manages to get right down into the grammar of the sentences that compose them. Add to this the overall verve and playfulness of the language here and it reminds one of the Wandering Rocks chapter of Joyce’s

Ulysses

: one city’s compendium of souls offered up to the reader for companionship by the force of a writer’s imagination.”

— Adam Haslett, author of You Are Not a Stranger Here

“The Italian immigrants in this exceptional debut collide and collapse in a polyphonic narrative that is part novel, part epic prose poem spanning the first half of the twentieth century. Radiant. . ravenous prose. . Scibona’s portrayal of the lost world of Elephant Park is a literary tour de force.”

— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Salvatore Scibona opens his debut novel,

The End

, with a spectacular sentence that describes one of the book ’s key characters in impressively complete detail. By the time the period arrives and the reader gets to take a full breath, the hook has been set. A page and a half later, Scibona. . devastates the reader with a simple, five-word sentence. Thought he was good on the first page? Wait until he pulls the rug out from under you on the third. . The reader. . desire[s] that the book might not end at all.”

— Cedar Rapids Gazette

“Salvatore Scibona has written a ravishing book: radiant, wise, and wonderfully idiosyncratic. It is thrilling to see the immigrant novel reinvented with such originality and deep feeling, where the language catches fire on every page. As much a metaphysical novel as a historical one,

The End

not only follows its searching characters as they travel across countries, states, and city blocks, but also charts hauntingly the journeys of their souls. Their arrival, in the form of this astonishing book, is cause for celebration.”

— Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Madeleine Is Sleeping

“Scibona’s prose contains the off-kilter rhythm and startling flourishes of imperfectly acquired English spoken by immigrants, and his narrative is laced with the overheard fragments — revelatory in their incomprehensibility — that James Joyce called ‘epiphanies’. . A demanding but rewarding novel.”

— Kirkus Reviews

“A portentous, labyrinthine debut novel of the epic search for home and the promise of a better future. . Brooding, intermittently gorgeous, bit tersweet, and devastating, Scibona’s storm-cloud novel. . twists together intense inner monologues and heartbreaking descriptions of smothering poverty and thankless labor, fractured families, and stabbing revelations of prejudice and racism. Add a ghost and subtle allusions to the radical changes industrialization wrought, and this is one loaded novel about twentieth-century America’s growing pains.”