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Christopher Castellani

All This Talk of Love – Leaving Delaware

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI’m not sorry that I took the time to read Christopher Castellani’s most recent novel before moving on to Pennsylvania.  In fact, I think I like this novel even more than I liked its predecessor. In All This Talk of Love, Antonio and Maddalena are in their seventies and their two surviving children are adults.  We learn early on that their eldest son, Tony, died as a teenager. Their youngest son, Frankie, is a graduate student, another lost soul searching for an academic life and interpersonal relationships that make sense.  Their daughter Prima, their first-born and a baby at the end of The Saint of Lost Things is the mother of three teenage sons, the last of which is about to go off to college.  For Prima, the empty nest is a frightening place.  She has always been close to her sons, a little too close probably.  Coupled with that, she sees her parents beginning to fail physically and mentally.  It’s her idea to take the entire family back to St. Cecelia, their ancestral village, for the trip of a lifetime.

But things happen throughout the novel which postpone the trip.  At first, Maddalena refuses to go, she has only her memories of St. Cecelia and doesn’t want to face how the place and the people have changed.  Frankie sides with his mother.  Then, there is an accident.  When the trip finally happens, it’s different from everyone’s original expectation, and meaningful to each of them individually for very different reasons. [Read more…] about All This Talk of Love – Leaving Delaware

Delaware, Part Two – Christopher Castellani

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Christopher CastellaniChristopher Castellani wins!  Okay, this blog isn’t meant to be a beauty contest for writers. That said, Castellani is my pick for Mr. Delaware.  Castellani has written a trilogy about an Italian Immigrant family, the Grassos, which begins and ends in St. Cecelia, a small village in Italy where the novel’s main characters, Maddalena and Antonio, meet and marry.

Because I believe that his latest book takes place in Italy and I’m looking to discover what life is like in Delaware, I begin reading the trilogy in the middle with The Saint of Lost Things.  In this novel, set in the fifties in Wilmington, the Grassos are just starting out, searching for their American OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERADream.  Antonio works on an assembly line at the Ford Motor Company while Maddalena rides the bus to a factory in Philadelphia where she bends over a sewing machine all day.  Any extra money they make gets sewn into a special pocket Maddalena has fashioned into the cornice of the drapes.  The Grassos live with Antonio’s family in the Italian neighborhood in Wilmington, a tight-knit community, ten square blocks with the Catholic church, St. Anthony’s, at the center.  The church, the houses of other families and Italian restaurants are all places where they gather on Sundays and for every important family event.  For Christmas Eve festivities, the women begin preparing food a week in advance, they make twelve pounds of pasta and seven different kinds of fish, delicate sauces and sweets galore.  These gatherings are filled with the kind of big emotions that come with big families – passion, jealousy and love, so much love.     [Read more…] about Delaware, Part Two – Christopher Castellani

Literary Road Trip

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PlayfulBooksI’m a reader.  I read all kinds of books, mostly fiction.  Sometimes a friend will suggest a book for me to read, or I’ll check out the New York Times Book Review on Sundays, or the Staff Picks shelf at my favorite independent bookstores.  It’s all pretty random. 

But recently I’ve become interested in the idea of place in literature.  The way that, in some novels, setting is character.  Think Dickens’s London — the characters who come alive in that city’s debtor’s prisons, courts of law, counting houses and blacking factories.  Those characters are unique reflections of Victorian London, where coal smoke continuously chugs into the damp air and lingers, trapped by fog, where there are no child labor laws and where poverty prevails. They could not exist anywhere else.  And what about modern fiction?  Are there good examples of novels today that evoke their setting in a way that makes them come alive, makes you feel like you’ve been dropped into a different world, a distinctive place with a flavor all its own?  I believe so.  I’ve read some.  And I’m on a quest now find one or two from each of the United States.  Hence this literary road trip.  I’ll start with Delaware, the first state, and keep going until I get to Hawaii.   I’ll choose books to read by looking up independent bookstores in the state, calling them up, and asking for a recommendation.

I’m excited but also a little concerned that, with the increasing homogeneity of the United States, those characteristics which distinguish one place from another have blurred over time.  Drop me off in a shopping mall anywhere from California to Pennsylvania and it’s likely I’ll have trouble figuring out where I am.  What distinguishes one city or state from another today when the same big box stores, retail chains and coffee shops are everywhere?  When we’re all connected by television and the internet.  Where we can wake up in one time zone and go to sleep in another just by taking a short plane ride.  Where children grow up in one state, go to college in another and find their first job in yet another state? I’m hoping to find out and write about it here. [Read more…] about Literary Road Trip