![]() ![]() Banner animates the familiar: Like pictures of a childhood summer, or a half-forgotten smell, this book is sweet and heady with nostalgia not radical, maybe, but comforting as a quilt. Walcott's poem continues, "I seek, / As climate seeks its style, to write / Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight, / Cold as the curved wave, ordinary / As a tumbler of island water." Water, like most ordinary things, isn't: It is rich with danger and miracle. The story of the island is one of "invaders and exiles, eruptions of liquid fire and ghostly weeping, mourning voices and caves full of the click of white bones." The storyline then elegantly echoes the myths, which have been drawn from Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales, among other places. The island is a place "where the earth heaved with stories," and each section opens with an island folktale that Amadeo has collected in a little red notebook. Instead, it has the gnomic and suggestive simplicity of a folktale, koanic rhythms that let you fill in whatever complexity you can into the elisions. The novel does not suffer from the fact that it uses familiar building blocks, or the fact that the inner lives of characters mostly stay there. Like pictures of a childhood summer, or a half-forgotten smell, this book is sweet and heady with nostalgia not radical, maybe, but comforting as a quilt.Īfter all, tropes are tropes for a reason (and Sicilians really do eat ricotta, drink limoncello and dance in the piazza). Women are beautiful, men are tall, the air smells of bougainvillea. In a similar way, The House at the Edge of Night is a lovely novel but not a precise one, a misty Mediterranean dream of a book in which there is only room for the emotions found in children's tales: sad, glad, hopeful, lonely. There, he starts a family, and the story of the dynasty and the island bar they own is the central narrative of Catherine Banner's new The House at the Edge of Night, a family saga that demonstrates that ideas don't have to be new to be good.ĭerek Walcott's lines "But islands can only exist / if we have loved in them" ornament the first page of The House at the Edge of Night, impressively meaningless words that nonetheless have a sundrenched romance to them. How?Īmadeo Esposito's first sight of the island of Castellamare is "a low and brooding thing on the horizon, no more than a rock on the water." On one side, the lights of Sicily are visible on the other side, pure black stretching all the way to Africa.Įsposito is a doctor desperate for work, and the only place that will take him is a tiny, rocky island off the coast of Sicily. ![]() Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The House At The Edge Of Night Author Catherine Banner Zoey, High Priestess in training, has managed to settle in at the House of Night and come to terms with the vast powers the Vampyre Goddess Nyx has given her. ![]()
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