So Much Smoke I Grady Harp I Amazon.com

January 16, 2016

Amazon.com: Grady Harp's review of So Much Smoke

Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for So Much Smoke at Amazon.com.Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users.

AMAZON.COM

Félix Calvino deserves a much wider audience here in the United States. His first collection of short stories gathered under the title A HATFUL OF CHERRIES were piquant brief morsels that ranged from a few pages to extended stories and every story manages to paint imagery and place and character so clearly with the most economical style that each appears like a flashback of thought in every reader's memory bank.

Calvino was born in Galicia and spent his childhood on a farm not unlike those scenes he so frequently recalls in these stories. Under the reign of General Franco, Calvino fled to England to study and work and eventually migrated to Australia where he currently lives and writes his magical prose. From these various regions Calvino gathers the fodder for his tales - stories that take place in Spain and in Australia with settings that range from dealing with the earth as a child to discovering love as a youth to encountering the realities of small community prejudices to simply celebrating the aspects of the very young to the very aged characters he describes so well.

Calvino's writing style is the opposite of florid. With a few brief sentences on a few pages he is able to bring the reader into the focal point of his stories that usually take a quiet twist at the end, a technique that makes reading a collection of short stories more like reading a full length novel, so engrossed is the reader in his ability to capture attention and imagination. Not that his writing is without color: for instance, in the story ‘They Are Only Dreams’ he writes ‘Mama, I had a dream last night,’ the girl says. ‘It was about a man in bed. He had a white beard. His mouth was open and there was a rattling sound coming from his throat. After he stopped rattling, I heard women crying loudly.’ He knows well how to speak of love, of desire, of tragedy and of humor and is equally at home with each of these and other emotions. The other stories in this collection include ‘The Hen’, ‘What Do You Know About Your Friends?’ ‘The Road’, ‘The Gypsies’, ‘So Much Smoke’, The Smile’, ‘The Sleepwalker’, ‘The Dream Girl’, ‘Kneading the Dough’ and ‘The Valley of Butterflies’.

Some astute publisher should capture the talents of this Spanish Australian writer. He deserves center stage in the arena of authors who have mastered the art of writing short stories as well as his very fine novel ‘Alfonso’. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, January 17

So Much Smoke I Tim Bazzett I Rathole Books

January 13, 2017

Tim Bazzett
http://RatholeBooks.com


Review

With his new collection of stories, SO MUCH SMOKE, Felix Calvino continues to chronicle the lives and journeys of Spanish emigrants to Australia, a task he began with the stories in his first book, A HATFUL OF CHERRIES, and continued in his exquisite novella, ALFONSO.

Calvino is himself such an emigrant, and the eleven stories here are about equally divided between stories of early childhood set in poor farming communities of Galicia, in northwest Spain, and more urban settings of Australia in the seventies and beyond. SO MUCH SMOKE seems, in some ways, to be more personal than the two earlier books. This is particularly evident in "The Dream Girl," a story that is set in Galicia, but also affords the reader a glimpse years into the future, when protagonist Gabriel has moved to Australia and made a new, successful life in business. His youthful dreams of teaching and writing stories have been given up or put 'on hold,' while the titular 'dream girl' has married, become a mother and a pharmacist. But there is much more to the story than this. In "The Dream Girl," Calvino pays tribute to Galician and Spanish writers he read in his youth, including them in two reading lists Gabriel is given by a teacher -

"One contains twenty titles by Galician authors; the other names over a hundred by Spanish authors. It begins with EL CANTAR DE MIO CID, DON QUIXOTE, LAZARILLO DE TORMES and ROMANCERO GITANO, iconic works of Spanish literature from the twelfth century, all the way to the poems of Federico Garcia Lorca."

The Galician writers are more obscure (at least to me). They include Rosalia de Castro, "the illegitimate child of an upper-class woman and a Catholic priest, who never acknowledged her." Gabriel finds that "The migrant's plight is a recurring theme in her work ... [and] having been a migrant for two-thirds of his life, he agrees with her insights." Two other Galician writers that ring true to Gabriel are Emilio Pardo Bazan and Ramon del Valle Inclan, the latter "considered by some critics to be the Spanish equivalent to James Joyce ..."

But perhaps equally interesting here is the frustration and disappointment that Gabriel [i.e. Calvino] felt at how hard it was for him to read the Galician texts, despite its being his native tongue, because the Franco government had forbade the teaching and even the speaking of such 'dialects,' to also include Basque, Catalan and others.

"Years later, as an adult, this disappointment will turn into anger towards those who deprive children of the right to learn to read and write in their mother tongue .. to Gabriel it will always be a crime ... [a language] preserves memories, legends, history."

"The Dream Girl" is perhaps the most personal of Calvino's stories, because in it he is able to express his love of literature, as well as how he came to be a writer. But the centerpiece here is probably the longest of the stories, "The Smile." It tells the story of a friendship between Jose and Fidel, both emigrants, and the simple lives they live in Sydney, where Jose is a hotel night clerk and Fidel is a street sweeper. Both Fidel and his wife, Consuelo, are physically homely - ugly even - people, but their love transforms them. So yes, there is a love story here. But there is also the theme of community and upward striving for a better life so common to most of  Calvino's emigrant stories set in Australia. Slowly, over a period of many months, Jose learns more and more of Fidel's story - how he met Consuelo back in Spain, how their courtship, how they came to Australia (as a part of Canberra's Spanish Migration Scheme and the Catholic Migration Committees). Their story unfolds gradually, in Calvino's trademark simple, detail-oriented style. Here's a sample -

"He washed his hands under the tap, rubbed salt and pepper on two large chickens and placed them in a baking dish, adding thin rashers of bacon on top. Waiting for the oven to heat, he filled a second baking dish with potatoes, carrots, capsicums and two small onions cut in half."

Reading this, I could not help but recall "Big Two-Hearted River," with its descriptions of Nick Adams making camp and preparing his meager meals in the Michigan north woods, and I wondered if Calvino knew that story, had been influenced by Hemingway. And yes, Calvino's writing is consistently Hemingway-esque. The subjects are different, but the stylistic similarities are unmistakable. Is it just smoke and mirrors? No, it's real. English may be Felix Calvino's third language, but you'd never know it from these stories. He is a meticulous writer at the top of his game. SO MUCH SMOKE displays so much talent. I continue to be amazed at the work of this man. Bravo, Felix. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER 

http://RatholeBooks.com

330 West Todd Ave

Reed City, MI 49677-1128

USA

So Much Smoke I James N. Powell I Goodreads

January 9, 2017

 James N. Powell

So Much Smoke

The narrative form of short fiction often ends with an unexpected unveiling. The same form, but suddenly standing before you nude. In this way short fiction is similar to another minimalist form, haiku. Many haiku, like cherry trees shedding their blossoms--one by one--expose a sadness at the heart of ephemerality. Much of Felix's stripped-down prose bares similarly poignant modes of being. You'll be hard pressed to find another writer who pulls it off with such silken abandon. 

James N. Powell
Goodreads