December 3, 2022
Coming in 2023
My story So Much Smoke has been adapted to a film written and directed by Elli Iliades.
Young Love & Other Stories I StylusLit I Alison Clifton
September 1, 2022
Young Love and Other Stories
By
Félix Calvino
Arcadia,
2021
Reviewed
by Alison Clifton, StylusLit
In his
masterful new short fiction collection, Young Love and Other Stories,
Félix Calvino explores the shadows, shades, and occasionally shady dealings of
the people who inhabit a village in the Carballo area of Galicia, Spain. The
interplay between light and shade, silhouettes, shadows, and mirrors, is
central to this collection. These stories of village life are set in a liminal
time: post-war but pre-electricity. At the one-room school, the lone teacher
makes annual promises that the shrinking village will be connected to the grid
the following year, while a dwindling group of ageing men gather after the
winter rains each spring to fix the unsealed roads.
This may
seem like a simple existence. Yet the lives of shepherds, trout fishers,
cowherds, basket-weavers, carpenters, healers, and publicans are complex and
multifaceted. Though a character may glimpse the bucolic idyll, threats of
starvation, social exclusion, and damnation loom over the landscape, casting
shadows of potential ruin. To live in a village is to know everyone and be
known by everyone. To have one more cow than a neighbour is to rank above them
in the social order, but also to teeter precariously close to peril. Fields can
flood, livestock can sicken and die, crops can be ravaged by drought. To be
different is to be a pariah, suspect, scapegoat. Yet all is not as stifling as
it may seem.
Calvino
enters into a dialogue with the giants of European art – visual, sculptural,
poetic, prose, and dramatic – who juxtapose light and dark in an eternal,
futile battle. In the Christian universe, the Devil must remain subordinate to
the omnipotent God who created him. Good must ultimately triumph. Yet, this
dichotomy provides the tension in so much of European art and literature.
Italian artists like Caravaggio used tenebrismo in
their paintings. A harsh, dramatic light isolated and accentuated heroic
figures, throwing the spotlight on the struggle between good and evil, Heaven
and Hell, God and Satan. Calvino witnesses the implications and repercussions
of this simplified, fabricated cosmos of chiaroscuro. Yes,
God is Light, but so too was Lucifer the Angel of Light before his fall.
Calvino recognises this kinship and rejects reductive binary oppositions.
Instead, his characters inhabit a world of subtle shades and hues: the greys
brighten to white as often as they darken to black.
Calvino’s
collection opens with “Sunday Lunch” (1-27): a meditative tale of loss and
death that introduces two protagonists who re-emerge in later stories the way
shoots sprout from the soil in spring. When the last female inhabitant of the
village, Avelina, dies, Amadeo and Manuel, the two surviving men, must bury her
in the proper manner. Things do not go as planned. The pair must make do and
mend as they have all their lives. Because it would take four men to shoulder a
casket, Amadeo and Manuel improvise. Thus, “the spectral silence of the
village” is disrupted by “the screeching of the rusty old wheelbarrow” that
will cart the body of their friend to her grave (25).
Meanwhile,
Mateo the dog watches on, a constant companion whose loyalty, dogged persistence,
and bathetic banality mirror the life of his owner, Manuel. Walking alone
through the ghost village at dusk, Manuel lowers his eyes, and the reader is
granted a glimpse into his thoughts: “This was the hour of neither day nor
night, when shadows, malformed, real, or imagined, appeared from nowhere,
silently. Shadows and ghosts were like twin brothers, he thought” (5). Manuel’s
matter-of-fact musings are presented without pomp or flourish. In this twilight
realm, almost anything is possible, and almost everything thought relegated to
the past is capable of re-emergence, regeneration, regrowth, reappearance…
perhaps even resurrection.
Calvino’s
deft touch with free indirect discourse is further evident in the delightful
“Young Love” (28-71). This story alternates between two focalisers – a youthful
Manuel and the love of his life, Amelia, who is lost to him under tragic
circumstances. The word “Carballo” not only refers to the region where the
village is located, but also the oak in the Galician language. Fittingly, one
of Manuel’s “favourite pastimes” is to lie on his back “under the enormous oak
trees” where he dreams of describing to his beloved Amelia the numinous
luminosity of “the sun’s rays filtered through the green leaves” (38). In such
moments, the young man, both tortured and thrilled by his nascent feelings for
his paramour, is dappled with light and shade under the protective, penumbral
oak tree.
Calvino’s
stories are punctuated with such quietly clever moments. His prose is as
unassuming and unhurried as the characters he depicts, yet also as deep,
generous, and abundant as the rivers and streams that flow through this rural
region of Spain.
Again, at
key moments in this story, Calvino focuses his lens on a character’s thoughts
to evocative effect. Manuel heads to a workshop where the young men and boys
gather to discuss the ever-mysterious matters of the flesh, the heart, and the
opposite sex. As he walks, he observes the time of day told through the waning
sunlight: “The afternoon shadows were lengthening, he noted. Shadows had always
intrigued him. They were part of his first recollections” (49). Light and
shadow are mutually dependent Calvino seems to suggest. We need both. We cannot
have one without the other.
Thus, in
“Abel’s Journey” (79-133), the reader learns that the protagonist is rapidly
going blind, his vision obscured by shadows. Abel keeps a gallery of mental
images to retain memories of places lost in the shadows of time. An orphan
passed from house to house, often treated less as servant than slave, Abel is a
figure of the shadows. The children at one house – no different in age to him
but accorded the status of family members rather than an inconvenient mouth to
feed – torment him before a flickering fire. They fill his shoes with “glowing
embers and ash” (85). Fire should provide light and warmth and the means to
cook nourishing food, but it is used to belittle the servant boy and destroy
his meagre possessions.
By
contrast, shadows provide comfort. There, Abel can rest in anonymity and be
certain of the passage of time: “he could always tell the hour by the shadows
shortening in the morning and lengthening in the afternoon on familiar trees or
a wall” (95). However, as Abel is uprooted so often, he is constantly displaced,
rendering everything unfamiliar once more.
Finally,
Abel settles into a family that cares for him and treats him like a son. He has
found a potential wife, Pilar, whose father is dead and whose mother’s health
is failing, meaning that she offers a modest house and land for them to fix and
farm together. However, just as his future appears bright, Abel faces losing
his sight entirely. The doctor despairs. Christina, Abel’s fearful protector
and the matriarch of the household he serves, turns her gaze inwards. She is
torn between risking the wrath of God by taking her ward to a healer in a
nearby village – a woman denounced as Satanic by the Church – and the prospect
of having to support a blind man for the rest of his life. Her husband’s land
can barely sustain their family. She prays. She rues her misfortune. She
considers accepting her fate as ordained by God. Yet, a faint hope glimmers. It
is offered by the healer.
There are
signs that all will be well. The village of Pereiras, where the healer lives,
nestles between hillsides dotted with “ancient oak trees” (126). Again, the
oak, the mightiest of trees according to the medieval Christian concept of the
Great Chain of Being, towers over the protagonists of these pages. The oak was
here long before the roots of Christianity took hold, and a magical, mystical,
pagan presence haunts this region. A spirit of the land predates Christianity,
and Abel is attuned to it.
This
communion is conveyed through the revelation that Pilar loves the “quiet
stability” that Abel brings to her life and his suggestions for “the planting
of trees” on her family’s property (109). In this way, Abel is allied with the
strong, silent oaks that cast their shade over the village, hills, and
waterways of Carballo. He is also a man of the shadows, not bothered by the
villagers’ superstition that they are “the hiding place of ghosts” (132).
Here is
subtle complexity. While Abel finds it strange that “some people were afraid of
shadows,” he also recognises that “shadows had been a source of hope as well as
frustration” for him (132). Shadows are “handy to measure the height of the
church’s bell tower, or a tree,” and they were “inexplicable companions in his
childhood” (132): friendly, if unfathomable. However, Abel also realises of the
shadows that “for many years, he had believed they were hiding the face of his
mother” (132). Orphaned, abandoned, unclaimed by his unknown father and
unwanted by his unwed mother, Abel is a product of shady circumstances. So,
too, is Marcia: the healer who protects his remaining vision. She lives in the
shadows of oppression and persecution. It is unsurprising, then, that her face
becomes obscured by time once Abel’s future is secured: “All his efforts to
install Marcia’s image in his scene gallery had failed” (133).
By contrast, Calvino’s collection is
a triumph. While Calvino eschews binary oppositions and superlatives in his
writing, his readers may find themselves resorting to almost hyperbolic
descriptions of his work. Calvino delivers a superb collection of fiction that
builds upon his earlier work even as it digs deeper into the past and roams
further from his adopted country of Australia. At once profound, comic, and
tragic, Young Love and Other Stories is a
stunningly-rendered kaleidoscope of rare beauty. Not all is monochrome. Warm
and radiant with light. Dark as though diving deep into the hearts and minds of
the people of Carballo. Calvino’s work relies on contrast and contradiction.
That is its power.
Benengeli 2022 I I Instituto Cervantes Sydney
June 6, 2022
Benengeli in the 5 continents. Realism: Javier Moreno, Andrew Pippos and Felix Calvino
The gradual return to the face-to-face activity is one of the great news of this year 2022. In five of the Instituto Cervantes centers around the world, the reflections of Spanish-language authors will be heard and they will dialogue with writers from Australia, India, France , Senegal and the United States, about the main elements of fiction in the whole world.
Thus, the authors Javier Moreno, Andrew Pippos and Félix Calviño will be talking about Realism with the Hispanist Luke Stegemann.
https://cultura.cervantes.es/sidney/en/benengeli-in-the-5-continents.-realism%3A-javier-moreno/152441
Instituto Cervantes I Benengeli 2022
May 25, 2022
BENENGELI 2022 THE LARGEST SPANISH-LANGUAGE LITERATURE FEST IN THE WORLD
Fri Jun 10 2022 at 06:00
pm Instituto Cervantes, 31 W Ohio St, Chicago, IL 60654, EE. UU., Chicago,
United States
INSTITUTO CERVANTES CHICAGO
PRESENTS THE CLOSING ROUND TABLE OF THIS WORLDWIDE EVENT. A DIALOGUE BETWEEN
THE WRITERS MIGUEL GOMES AND FREDERICK DE ARMAS MODERATED BY ROCÍO FERREIRA
Instituto Cervantes in Chicago
is proud to announce that it will be part of the worldwide literary festival
Benengeli 2022 which will take place from 6th to the 10th of June in the five
continents with more than 40 Spanish English and French writers offering their
reflections on the theme of realism.
The Instituto Cervantes in Spain as part of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs is working on a worldwide literary festival that promotes Spanish literature Benengeli 2022 the International Week of Spanish Literature. Benengeli 2022 will be jointly hosted at the centres of Instituto Cervantes in Chicago (North America) Toulouse (Europe) Casablanca (Africa) New Delhi (Asia) and Sydney (Australia). The central theme of Benengeli 2022 is realism.
Benengeli 2022 closing event at the Instituto Cervantes in Chicago on June 10th at 6 pm with the Miguel Gomes conversing with Frederick de Armas about narrative fictions in the 21st century and the weight that realistic aesthetics. Rocío Ferreira will act as moderator of this remarkable event.
Miguel Gomes is a storyteller born in Caracas in 1964. He studied at the University of Coimbra in Portugal and at the Central University of Venezuela. He later obtained a doctorate at Stony Brook University in New York. Since 1989 he has lived in the United States where he works as a graduate professor at the University of Connecticut. Among his titles are the novels Llévame esta noche Retrato de un caballero and Ante el jurado; books of short stories La cueva de Altamira Un fantasma portugués and Julieta en su castillo; and volumes of criticism and essays El pozo de las palabras Los géneros literarios en Hispanoamérica and La realidad y el valor estético: configuraciones del poder en el ensayo hispanoamericano.
https://languages.uconn.edu/person/miguel-gomes/
Frederick de Armas received
his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina. He has
published novels El abra de Yamurí and Sinfonía Salvaje as well as several
critical essays including “El retorno de Astrea: Astrología mito e imperio en
Calderón” “La astrología en el teatro clásico europeo” and “Cervantes'
Architectures: The Danger Outside.” He has served as president of the Cervantes
Society of America and the International Association Siglo de Oro (AISO). He
currently holds the Andrew W. Mellon Chair at the University of Chicago.
https://rll.uchicago.edu/frederick-de-armas
Rocío Ferreira
https://las.depaul.edu/academics/modern-languages/faculty/spanish/Pages/rocio-ferreira.aspx
Rocío Ferreira is Associate
Professor of Latin American literature culture and cinema and Chair of the
Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at DePaul University in Chicago. She
earned a doctorate in Latin American literature and in Women’s Gender and
Sexualities Studies from the University of California Berkeley. She specializes
in nineteenth-century and contemporary literary and visual culture written by
women. Her areas of research are foundational narratives and journalism of the
19th century war literature (XIX-XXI) and contemporary issues related to the
configurations of memory in literature culture and cinema. She has participated
in numerous international congresses has published critical articles in
specialized books and scholarly journals and critical editions in addition to
her monograph De las Veladas literarias a la Cocina ecléctica: mujeres cultura
y nación en el Perú decimonónico. She is currently writing a new book on women
writing on the Peruvian internal armed conflict entitled Las mujeres disparan:
Imágenes y poéticas de la violencia política (1980-2000) en la cultura
literaria y visual peruana contemporánea.
Voices of great aesthetic power such as those of Piedad Bonnet (Colombia) Katya Adaui (Peru) Magela Baudoin (Bolivia) Carlos Cortés Zúñiga (Costa Rica); Selva Almada (Argentina) Rodrigo Blanco Calderón (Venezuela) Evelio Rosero (Colombia) Fernanda Trías (Uruguay) Vicente Luis Mora (Spain) Mayra Santos Febres (Puerto Rico) Carlos Franz (Chile) Ronaldo Menéndez (Cuba) Pedro Crenes (Panama) Antonio José Ponte (Cuba) Santiago Gil (Spain) and Jacinta Escudos (El Salvador) will present the elements that constitute the axis of their work and the relationship of love distance or rejection that each one of them experiences in front of the realistic discourse that seems to define a good part of the universal narrative of this moment of the 21st century.
Outstanding narrators such as
Valeria Correa Fiz (Argentina) David Toscana (Mexico) and Spaniards Juana
Salabert Daniel Gascón Bárbara Mingo Costales and José Ovejero will talk about
their most recent books; titles that constitute a living landscape on the
fictional recreation that marks current times.
Impossible to forget the
presence of the Lima writer Fernando Iwasaki who will offer small spoken
portraits on the play with reality that authors belonging to various traditions
and territories and who have adopted or maintained Spanish as their artistic
language make. We will thus get to know the work of Siu Kam Wen Fabio Morabito
Ioana Gruia Kalman Barsy and Mónika Zgustova.
As the dialogue between diverse literary
traditions is one of the main attempts of Benengeli 2022 the activities will
also include the presence of writers such as Lydie Salvayre (France); Ken Bugul
(Senegal) Andrew Pippos (Australia) Félix Calviño (Spain/Australia) and Geetanjali
Shree (India).
Benengeli 2022 an initiative
of the Cervantes Institute whose curator is writer Nicolas Melini has the
support of institutions and cultural entities from Buenos Aires Lima La Paz
Bogota Caracas San Jose de Costa Rica San Juan de Puerto Rico Panama City Las
Palmas de Gran Canaria Santa Cruz de La Palma Seville and Madrid.
Between June 6 and 10 in
addition to the on-site activities in each of the five cities of Benengeli 2022
the virtual programming of this festival will be available through the
Instituto Cervantes in in Sydney New Delhi Toulouse Dakar and Chicago You Tube
channels the Podcast channel of the Cervantes Institute and through the
following link: https://cvc.cervantes.es/benengeli22/. As mentioned at the
beginning of this information the content will be available not only in Spanish
but also in dubbed or subtitled versions in English.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/benengeli-2022-the-largest-spanish-language-literature-fest-in-the-world-tickets-348204558207?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
Instituto Cervantes I Benengeli 2022 I elDiario.es/
May 25, 2022
Benengeli 2022, la Semana
Internacional de la Literatura en Español del Instituto Cervantes, recorrerá
este año todo el planeta y tendrá lugar en las sedes del Instituto Cervantes en
Sídney, Nueva Delhi, Toulouse, Dakar y Chicago.
Con el «realismo» como tema básico,
el nicaragüense Sergio Ramírez, el peruano Alfredo Bryce Echenique,
Eduardo Halfon de Guatemala, Luisa Valenzuela de Argentina, el
venezolano miguel gomes y los españoles Rosa Montero,
Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Soledad Puértolas, José Manuel Fajardo, Marta Barrio
y Javier Moreno intervendrán en los distintos apartados de esta semana, que
también incluye encuentros con narradores de Australia, India, Francia, Senegal
y EE.UU. Estados Unidos
Mesas redondas presenciales,
entrevistas, micropresentaciones en video, diálogos radiales son los formatos
que componen este evento, que traerá al mundo una destacada y variada selección
de la mejor literatura en nuestro idioma.
Voces de gran poder estético como
las de Piedad Bonnet (Colombia), Katya Adaui (Perú), Magela Baudoin (Bolivia),
Carlos Cortés Zúñiga (Costa Rica); Selva Almada (Argentina),
Rodrigo Blanco Calderón (Venezuela), Evelio Rosero (Colombia),
Fernanda Trias (Uruguay), Vicente Luis Mora (España), Mayra Santos
Febres (Puerto Rico), Carlos Franz (Chile), Ronaldo Menéndez (Cuba),
Pedro Crenes (Panamá), Antonio José Ponte (Cuba), Santiago Gil
(España) y Jacinta Escudos (El Salvador) expondrán los elementos que forman el
eje de su obra y la relación de amor, distancia o rechazo que cada uno de ellos
crea frente a los más discurso realista, que parece definir gran parte de la
narrativa universal de este momento del siglo XXI.
También disertantes destacados
como Valeria Correa Fiz (Argentina), David Toscana (México) y los españoles
Juana Salabert, Daniel Gascón, Bárbara Mingo Costales y José Ovejero hablarán
sobre sus últimos libros; Títulos que acaban de aparecer en las librerías en
nuestro idioma, y que configuran un paisaje vivo sobre la
recreación ficcional que marca el tiempo actual.
Inolvidable es la presencia del
escritor limeño Fernando Iwasaki, quien ofrecerá pequeños retratos hablados
sobre el juego con la realidad, realizados por autores pertenecientes a
diferentes tradiciones y territorios, que han adoptado o mantenido el español
como lenguaje artístico. Así conocemos las obras de Siu Kam Wen, Fabio
Morabito, Ioana Gruia, Kalman Barsy y Mónika Zgustova.
Como el diálogo entre diferentes tradiciones literarias es uno de los
principales intentos de Benengeli 2022, las actividades también serán
impulsadas por escritores como Lydie Salvayre (Francia); Geetanjali Shree
(India); Ken Bugul (Senegal), Frederick de Armas (Estados Unidos), Andrew Pippos (Australia) y Félix Calviño
(España/Australia).
Benengeli 2022, una iniciativa del
Instituto Cervantes, cuyo curador es el escritor palmesano Nicolás Melini,
cuenta en esta ocasión con el apoyo de instituciones y organismos culturales de
Buenos Aires, Lima, La Paz, Bogotá, Caracas, San José de Costa Rica , San Juan
Puerto Rico, Ciudad de Panamá, Santa Cruz de La Palma, Las Palmas de Gran
Canaria, Sevilla y Madrid.
Entre ellos podemos señalar a la
Universidad de Loyola; la Real Academia de la Lengua; Asale (España); el
Instituto Caro y Cuervo (Colombia); Radio Deseo (Bolivia), Radio Universidad
(Costa Rica), Unión Radio (Venezuela), Radio Universidad (Puerto Rico), KW
Continente (Panamá), Revista Libros y Letras (Colombia); RNE en Madrid y
Canarias (España) y Cadena Ser en Canarias (España).
Entre el 6 y el 10 de junio se
podrá acceder a la programación virtual de Benengeli 2022 a través de los
canales de YouTube del Cervantes de Sydney, Nueva Delhi, Toulouse, Dakar y
Chicago y el canal de podcast del Instituto Cervantes; Contenido que se puede
disfrutar no solo en español sino también en versiones dobladas o subtituladas
en inglés y francés.
https://www.eldiario.es/canariasahora/lapalmaahora/cultura/nicolas-melini-comisario-benengeli-2022-encuentro-internacional-letras-espanol-instituto-cervantes_1_9024741.html
Young Love & Other Stories I Anne Di Lauro
In Félix Calvino’s Young
Love we meet Manuel as an old man, and then have the pleasure of recognising
him again in the story that follows, as a boy in love. In other stories we meet
other young people, each with their poignant love story to tell. We are
transported to another time and place, to a Galician village, perhaps about 50
years ago. We accompany the characters in their daily tasks and routines and
dance with them at weddings and festivals. The sense of place is vividly
conveyed. We are there in the school room, in the family kitchen, at gatherings
where the young learn about life and love from village hearsay, while trying to
understand their dawning feelings of love. The stories are wrapped in a
poignant sense of potential tragedy that is never spelled out: an atmosphere
that is a hallmark of all of Félix Calvino’s stories. This, as well as the
simplicity and quiet wit with which the stories are told, makes his writing
stand out as unusual and refreshing.
Anne Di Lauro
Young Love & Other Stories I Janice Jones
May 21, 2022
Felix’s writing is dreamy, sensuous and evocative
of love on an intimate scale, and slower time. I have loved reading A Hatful of
Cherries, and Young Love…both tender and evocative collections of human stories
unwinding in slow time. Gorgeous. Just what I needed to remind me of real love.
https://www.facebook.com/felix.calvino.1/
Young Love & Other Stories I The Fountain
April 18, 2022
Review of Young Love, Felix Calvino's new offering.
Open any volume of Tang dynasty poets and you will often find their inner spirits and those of mountains and rivers illumining one another. Li Bai, for instance, lived for a while as a hermit lost among craggy peaks. Across hollow gorges, tones from his flute echoed. Deer flocked to him, licking pine nuts from the palms of his hands and rubbing their necks against the trunks of fragrant pines. The intimate relationship between the landscape and Bai's creativity is captured in his life’s most enduring image: of himself, one evening, attempting to embrace the full moon’s reflection in a lake.
Even in lonely rooms, lost within the din of busy cities, William Wordsworth would reminisce on the beauteous forms of the English countryside, of the whispers of springs flowing among steep and lofty cliffs, of orchards of pastoral farms green to their very doors. These images opened a door within the poet wherein, with his blood and very breath stilled, he became a living soul.
For Bi and Wordsworth, the inner luminosity of the landscape provides a spiritual commons, a source of creativity any artist can reflect to nurture inspiration.
For the past several thousand years, vast swaths of the Iberian Peninsula have served as commons. Within the forested folds of a Galician village, some of the characters in Felix Calvino's latest volume, Young Love, often alone, and often at night, discover within the hinterlands of their hearts, a secret, living fountain of creativity. The only authority needed to put this bounty to use is to do so.
So Much Smoke I Short Film I Elli Iliades
March 26, 2022
Day 1 of filming So Much Smoke.
This film wouldn’t be possible without the beautiful short story by Felix Calvino and our incredible cast and crew.
Goodreads Giveaway I Young Love & Other Stories
January 31, 2022
Goodreads Book Giveaway
Young Love & Other Stories
by Felix Calvino
Being released December 02 2022This giveaway is already over.
Young Love & Other Stories I Amazon I Noh
January 27, 2022
Like a bird's nest holding six subtly hued bird's eggs, Galician Felix Calvino offers up yet
another gathering of tales from his homeland, stories as haunting as they are enchanting.
Young Love & Other Stories I Amazon I Grady Harp
January
26, 2022
Grady Harp
'Gossipers need to feed their addictions'
Félix Calvino deserves a much wider audience here
in the United States. His novel ALFONSO proved his mettle for extending a
thought into a full-length novel. Yet 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 managed 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.
Furthering his appreciation for the art of short stories, he has published SO
MUCH SMOKE, and now YOUNG LOVE & OTHER STORIES, proving he is a master
craftsman!
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.
The stories in this collection are Sunday Lunch, Young Love, Knick-knacks,
Abel’s Journey, The Beehives, and Shopping Trip. 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. Example, in the story ‘Sunday
Lunch’ he writes ‘Manuel stood in the doorway of the kitchen and asked, “what
are you cooking that smells so good?” “Stewed partridge with herbs and new
potatoes.” Amadeo answered, without looking up from the kitchen bench where he
was chopping parsley with a large knife. “Have you seen Avelina?” “I saw her a
few days ago. She said she was making a cake to mark the occasion” “What
occasion?” ‘She didn’t say.” Manual, Amadeo and Avelina were the three
remaining inhabitants of the remote village of Carballo. The men were both
seventy-seven, fragile, lean, and of average height…Avelina was seven years younger,
short and slim…Their relationship, although they had lived and shared in all
aspects of the village public life, had never been a close one.’ – We then
discover the destiny of this tale as the core of ‘interconnected stories that
call up the ghosts of the past half-century for the three survivors of a
lively, colourful world that had no notion of how soon it was to disappear.’
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. Very highly recommended. Grady Harp, January 22
https://www.amazon.com/Young-Other-Stories-F%C3%A9lix-Calvino/dp/192266927X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=34MCHF8NJAK2J&keywords=young+love+%26+other+stories+by+felix+calvino&qid=1643236872&sprefix=young+love+%26+o
The Library Thing I Tim Bazzett
January 13, 2022
Young Love & Other Stories
Tim Bazzett
It’s probably been a few years since I’ve read
any Hemingway, but every time I read something by Felix Calvino, I think of old’
Ernie. Because his influence is so strong it shows through in Calvino’s
stories. From the first pages of YOUNG LOVE & OTHER STORIES, in “Sunday
Lunch,” for example, with its “cooking that smells so good … Stewed partridge
with herbs and new potatoes … [and] chopping parsley with a large knife,” I was
taken back to the Nick Adams stories in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and Nick
pitching his camp near a trout stream and preparing an onion sandwich with
thick slices of bread. Granted, the Galician village in the northwest corner of
Spain is a long way from upper Michigan, but the ‘flavor’ and the plain, spare
language are very similar.
Felix Calvino is an Australian, but he emigrated
there from Galicia via England more than fifty years ago, and it always amazes
me that his prose, so starkly honed to perfection, is written in what is his
third language, because Galician dialect is more like Portuguese than Spanish
(his second language, learned in school), and then to master English in this
way, as an adult, well, it simply boggles my mind. Think Nabokov, maybe, who
learned to write in English, after he was already an accomplished writer in his
native Russian. Or the Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri, who recently began
writing in Italian simply because she fell in love with the language.
YOUNG LOVE & OTHER STORIES is Calvino’s fourth
book, following two other story collections, A HATFUL OF CHERRIES and SO MUCH
SMOKE, and a novella, ALFONSO. I’ve read them all and they are, quite simply,
the finest examples of pure storytelling one might ever encounter. In this
newest collection, Calvino has chosen to focus on a few of the denizens of one
tiny Galician village in the era of Franco. The first story, “Sunday Lunch,”
sets the scene in the final years of the village, when there are only three
people left, all septuagenarians, survivors who have become casual friends,
meeting weekly –
“It had started with coffee, bread and cheese
following the burial of Generosa several years earlier, the last village woman
but for Avelina. They had taken turns doing the cooking until Amadeo said that
cooking relaxed him. Manuel contributed fresh bread and game, and Avelina
brought homemade biscuits, trout and eel when in season.”
And then, suddenly, there were only the two men,
coping calmly and sadly with the task of burying Avelina, and worrying about
the propriety of how to wash and prepare her body, something that had always
been a task for the women. As they go about wrapping the corpse, digging the
grave and building a coffin, both Manuel and Amadeo are lost in their own
thoughts, remembering past wakes and the unusual history of Avelina, who had
endured a forced marriage and a long widowhood, managing quite well on her own.
They use a wheelbarrow to transport the body to the cemetery at the other end
of town, and build the coffin at graveside of scrap lumber. They remember to
bring ropes to lower the box into the grave, but forget to bring more nails for
securing the lid. But they agree it is a “barbaric” custom, so they covered the
unsecured lid with only partially filled shovels, “deposited with extreme care,
as if not to awaken Avelina.”
In the title story, “Young Love,” we are taken
back to Manuel’s boyhood, his friendship with Carlos, and his long, nearly mute
courting of Amelia (who likes him because of his quietness), first in the
schoolroom and then after they have left school. This is indeed a story of
“young love,” in the sweetness and innocence of the couple, filled with those
inner insecure feelings of “does he/she really love me?” as well as all the
inner turmoil of sexual awakening. And in a long sequence about a wedding
attended in a nearby village, we learn that the young men are leaving the
region because there are “no women of marriageable age” and fewer babies being
born each year, which perhaps explains Manuel’s nearly deserted village of
sixty years later.
“Abel’s Journey” is perhaps the most absorbing of
the six connected stories here, and the longest, at more than fifty pages. Abel
is an orphan, passed from family to family for the first twelve years of his
life, used mostly as a farmhand and cowherd, until he comes to the home of
Antonio and Cristina and their two children, where he is finally well-treated
and accepted as “part of the family.” But he continues to wonder about his own
unknown mother. He falls in love with Rosalia who emigrates to Australia, then
with Pilar, and then he is off to the Army for his national service, traveling
across Spain to a training camp near Zargoza. There he makes a good friend in
Jose, who helps him to learn who his mother was and what happened to her. But
then, upon his return home to Antonio and Cristina’s farm, preparing to marry
Pilar, he learns he is losing his sight.
Throughout Abel’s story he continuously falls back
on a gallery of scenes from his life, mental pictures and images he can call up
at will. I could relate easily to this, as I too have a “scene gallery” from
the various stages of my life, images that never fade. These images become more
important as we age and physical strength and abilities begin to fade. Calvino
and I are the same age. Judging from the stories here, we both understand well
the changes that age can bring – friends die, priorities change, and memories
become so important. I was pleased to note that there was a dog in many of
these stories. Manuel has had several dogs in his lifetime, all named Mateo,
after one of the Apostles. There is a Mateo in the first story here, and
another Mateo in the last, a puppy. Dogs and old men. I get it, Felix. I love
my dogs too. And I loved the stories here. I wish I were a little better at
explaining why they move me so, but, well, they just do. The language here is
so exact, so spare, so beautiful. The characters are so real, so perfectly
realized, so very human. My very highest recommendation.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVE
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