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
Young Love & Other Stories I Jill Lindquist I ABC Book Club
January 10, 2022
Young Love &and Other Stories
Jill Lindquist
One of my favourite Australian writers, Félix Calvino, has
produced another stunning collection of stories, Young Love & other
Stories (Arcadia) which takes the reader into the heart of his homeland in
Galicia, Spain, revealing the essence of his rural upbringing and sharing
stories of life and love in all its various forms. As in Calvino’s other
collections, the stories are atmospheric and deceptively
simple. I’ll provide my impressions of just two:
The first story ‘Sunday Lunch’ describes a barren, remote
Galician village, once a bustling community but now silent and decaying and
with only two men and a woman the surviving residents. The three
elderly friends meet for lunch each Sunday. It is their way of checking in on
each other and a time to share stories of the past. When they find the woman,
Avelina, dead, the two men must deal with the process of giving her a
respectful send off. They are in shock and ill-prepared. Their heartbreak,
difficulty and frustration at dealing with the body of their friend is
palpable. There is also the unspoken question that with only the two
of them remaining, which would die first and leave the other alone to face the
impossible burden of doing all that the two together could barely manage for
Avelina?
The title story ‘Young Love’ is a sensitive
portrayal of a boy, Manuel, transitioning with all the painful shyness,
confusion and insecurity that comes with crossing the great divide from boy to
man. Manuel’s stumbling attempts to negotiate the minefield of
misunderstandings in the world of courtship are told against the backdrop of
the changing seasons, work in the fields, the bonds of male friendship and
social opportunities to observe and engage with the ever-mysterious
female.
Calvino’s writing is so very evocative; his voice authentic.
There is a humanity and sweetness to the stories that avoids sentimentality. He
stretches out a hand and takes his reader into a very different world but one
which explores universal themes.
Book Launch I Melissa Ashley
Avid Reader
December 16,
2021
Melissa Ashley Book Launch speech
Good
evening, and welcome. It is my absolute honour and delight to speak a few words
about Félix Calvino, author of the brilliant new collection of short stories, Young
Love.
I
first met Félix Calvino when we were postgraduates at the University of
Queensland. According to Félix, one day I came out of my supervisor’s room
after a meeting sobbing (I don’t actually remember this part). But I do
remember that I was struggling and Félix told me to come with him, we would go
for a walk. We bought coffee and drank in the fresh air and bright sun and this
became our daily habit. Both Félix the man and Félix the author are excellent
guides in finding practices – daily observances – that break down periods of being
stale, tired, stuck. And both Félix’s need connection and friendship. Ritual
and fraternity are central themes in Calvino’s stories and as proof, I have a
lovely quote. He puts it far more eloquently than me. He is a poet, really.
It’s from the first story in Young Love: ‘Sunday Lunch.’
‘I said that what was good for him was
good for me. We walked on under a low, bright moon. We took the long way
around, avoiding the village, to reach the Hernandez watermill at the foot of
the hills where the river is born.’ (18)
I
had read A Hatful of Cherries (2007) before I met Félix and was much in
awe of his talents and thrilled when he befriended me. Félix is one of the most
generous people I know and has taught me much about writing and about life. Be
kind to oneself, practice, persevere. Have faith. A change of scenery when
bogged. I observed it all while I was at university with Félix in his lived
example. He toiled over the collection he wrote for his degree, So Much
Smoke, not unlike the rye-threshing and wheat-grinding manual labourers he
was writing about. I would always ask about how his book was coming along. He usually
dramatically shook his head. His answers had a similar theme: I am writing
it again. I am having a tough day. It is progressing very slowly. I love Félix’s
Philip Roth / James Joyce perfectionism, but it is all a humble front –
genuinely so, of course. Félix has a work-ethic of stone.
Along
with A Hatful of Cherries and So Much Smoke, Félix has also
published a novel, Alfonso. We are here tonight to celebrate the release
of his fourth book, the short story collection, Young Love. The six short
stories contained in Young Love explore the demise of the – never named
– Galician village that Félix grew up in. If you have read Félix, you will know
that this is a literary place he returns to over and over in his stories. In Young
Love, which Félix tells me has been the most difficult of his books to
write, a eulogy is created for the village and its former inhabitants, its
centuries of tradition, the failure of its outmoded agriculture and ensuing
poverty, the migrations of its youth and families.
‘There is nothing left,’ Félix says to
me, with a wistful shrug and glance of the eye that conveys so much more than a
long and wordy explanation.
Galicia
is a coastal region in the northwest of Spain – it has its own language – which
for centuries was one of the poorest parts of the country. Waves of migration
pepper its history, beginning in the nineteenth century, and continuing into
the mid-twentieth century and beyond. Félix himself left Galicia in 1964 at twenty
years of age, to escape military service.
Calvino
uses the character Manuel, who features in five of the stories in the
collection, as a metaphor for the demise of the village. We first meet him in
his seventies, in ‘Sunday Lunch’. The youngest we are introduced to him is at
age fourteen in 1939, after the end of the Spanish Civil War. It is the period
of Franco’s authoritarian rule, which will last until the mid-1970s during
which time many Spanish fled the country. When we leave Manuel, his literally
the last man standing in the nameless village – despite a limp – along with his
new puppy, Mateo.
The
short story genre is one of pressure, economy, strong themes and repercussions.
It is a completely different beast to the novel, which relies upon the coherence
of plot to bring all the ribbons of narrative into a tight package. In the
short stories, the actions, thoughts and experiences of a character can be
singularly explored and examined, the consequences of a choice or event stripped
down to the barest of essentials. The narrative arrangement of Young Love
is particularly compelling, in that all of the stories speak to one another,
and in this vein, it recalls writers like Alice Munroe and Elizabeth Strout,
who have written collections that span the lives of a specific character, not
as a galloping plot, but a series of discrete images, memories, events, in
short stories.
I
must make a little aside here and advise you to read Félix’s collection from
front to the back. It is not chronologically arranged, but like Adele’s last
album – she had Spotify turn off a function that let listeners hear the tracks
in random order – Félix has chosen the order of each story carefully and for
precise reasons.
The
first story in Young Love, called ‘Sunday Lunch’, begins on the day of
the weekly meal shared by characters Amadeo, Avelina and Manuel. Loosely
friendly and in their seventies, the trio are the last three inhabitants of the
village. However, plans for Sunday lunch are abandoned when Manuel and Amadeo
discover that Avelina has died.
‘Sunday
Lunch’ unfolds as an allegory, a metaphor for Félix’s theme of the death of the
village, the character Manuel personifying, embodying, the complex reasons for
its end. We discover that Avelina, Manuel and Amadeo have carried on the
tradition of preparing the dead for burial, and with Avelina dead, the rituals
cannot be properly observed. Félix concretises the absoluteness of the
abandonment of the village by its former inhabitants by closely describing the labour
required to bring the body to the cemetery. The coffin cannot be carried in one
piece by the men, and they must nail it together at the gravesite.
Félix
uses powerful imagery to convey one of the major reasons for the village’s
demise, which is poverty brought about by the failure to modernise its
agricultural economy:
‘One of my vivid memories of her is the
growing consternation on her face when adding a piece of salted pork from the
pig killed at Christmas to the vegetable soup, and how the piece got smaller
and smaller from month to month. That was only one of the things that measured
the nightmare of poverty she had to contend with every day of her life.’
As
with Félix’s prior work, he is a master of a compressed metaphor, combining a
striking visual image with an arresting subtext or inference.
Here
is another example, from ‘Sunday Lunch’:
‘Do you ever smoke / no / but you know
how smokers roll their cigarettes / I do / Manuel proceeded to wrap her light
and small body with great care. Both the sheet and the blanket were
sufficiently wide to wrap her twice and long enough to tuck in her head and
feet’
Félix’s
narrators are at heart solitary, kind, stoic and fatalistic. Both Manuel and
Abel – a young orphan who is treated poorly, moving from home to home – internalise
their suffering, ruminating and meditating upon yearning to meet a woman, a
desire for connection. A major theme in Félix’s works is a self-imposed
solitude, the dignity in this, its deep and private longing. The narrator in
Sunday Lunch provides a clue that perhaps the inner life is the more authentic,
that we cannot judge from the self we present to others:
‘He then remembered the educated saying
that in every man and woman was an internal and external individual. The
external one was just appearance, while the inner was reality.’
Talk
is cheap for Félix’s characters, and readers are taken on a journey into their
inside lives, their confusion, desires, their suffering and the transcendence
and joy they experience, when perhaps a moment exposes a coherent thread
connecting all. In ‘Sunday Lunch’:
‘Once or twice, the men looked at one
another and returned to the food. The tasks ahead, although in their minds,
were not mentioned.’
The
young Abel, in the short story Abel’s Journey is Félix’s most abject, discarded
character. As a child, he is abandoned and motherless, shuffled from home to
home. Later in life, when he has overcome many obstacles, he develops an eye
disease that will send him blind:
‘In this carnival of frustrations, Abel
retreated into himself, into protective silence. He became sparse with his
words and rarely expressed his opinion. In any case, decisions had always been
made for him, and arguing with the decisions had been counterproductive. He
felt no animosity towards anyone; it was simply the way things were, and he
could only get used to it.’
In
the story ‘Young Love’, fourteen-year-old Manuel lives off the glances he
shares with a girl in his class, Amelia, an experience we can all remember, an
intense crush that is made of projection and innocence. It is tender, fragile
and perhaps, as in a story like ‘Cat People’, delusional. However, this is
where Félix is elusive, uncanny, a little psychic even. For in ‘Young Love’, the
beloved Amelia experiences the same feelings as Manuel:
‘But in her actions, there was a higher
purpose than just giving a compliment. He had stirred feelings in her, well
before her friends of the same age had begun to take an interest in boys.
Initially, it was curiosity, as it seemed to her he avoided being noticed. Then,
she liked the way he walked, his pleasant face, the soothing tone of his voice.
He would not be much taller than her, which was fine. And he was given to speak
when it mattered, unlike most other boys who talked all the time and said
nothing.’
Through
Manuel, the reader tenderly rediscovers these emotions, distilled by Félix into
the speech of the heart and the speech of the body. The language is crisp,
perhaps a nod to Hemmingway or Beckett, a modernist minimalism, clearly but
gently delivering its knowledge of nostalgia and youth.
Another
theme Félix explores is the village’s conservative, traditional beliefs. As in
previous writing, he circles back around Catholic customs, sifting through that
which is useful and discarding practices which bring added suffering. Many of Félix’s
characters are children and adolescents who are still discovering their
identities, questioning received practices and sloughing off or undermining
customs and attitudes they have little evidence are true or good. When the judgement
of the community is harsh, cruel, scapegoating or vilifying, Félix addresses
these injustices.
This
is Amelia, from ‘Young Love’, thinking to herself about not conforming to the
society’s expectations:
‘She had her aunt to thank for it.
‘Desires, setbacks, confusion are part of life, and you must have a place to
escape to in rough times,’ she had said to her once. She liked her aunt very
much. A failed nun, a failed lover, now back home to stay was the
adults’ description that Amelia was not supposed to hear.’
Félix
subverts village prejudices with a clever, gentle humour, favouring the
outsider, and turning them around, so a different aspect of their humanity is
revealed. But his characters never
completely turn their backs upon what is known and supposedly fixed. Rather,
they consider and question if a practice is useful, and try to discover why it
is this way. If it is helpful, practical, and not harmful, his characters
maintain the status quo. Says Amadeo in ‘Sunday
Lunch’:
‘I have no interest in the ideology of
it. It is tradition that I respect.’
Félix’s
characters all have a little of the Buddha in them. Or perhaps a Greek stoic. They
accept suffering as a given, they quietly carry it with them, but they do not,
I think add to it with guilt, hatred, cruelty, making their burdens heavier and
more unpleasant. There is something deeply affirming about this. Félix takes
pains to show his characters’ quiet desperation, made bearable by routine and
ritual, acts of grace and kindness, and conviviality, the pleasures of sharing
a meal:
On the grinding stone, covered with a
tablecloth, there was a wicker basket containing wine, cheese, bread, salami,
tins of this and that. In one corner, there was a bed of hay and blankets, and
in the other, there was wood ready for a small fire.
Félix
is also very funny. In a sly and clever way, with various layers. This image
here is typical of him, from the short story ‘Abel’s Journey’:
They were in bed, lying on their backs
in matching white-and-blue-striped flannel pyjamas. Cristina had made them in
the pattern of prison uniforms from a roll of cloth they had bought at a
closing-down sale some years back. Half of the cloth was still on the roll,
standing behind the door in her sewing room. Occasionally, it reminded them of
ill-fated inmates serving long sentences.’
And
another one, from the story ‘The Beehives’:
‘The queen bee had his respect – a life
of responsibility and progeny. The humble worker bee has his affection – a
brief life of relentless toil, beginning with cleaning out the cell where each
is born. As for the drones, who only have to mate but otherwise never do a
day’s work, he does not care for them.’
I
sometimes think Félix the author is a philosopher, a psychologist even. He
practises, in all of his characters, an unconditional love, an unconditional
positive regard, and it is freeing, an opening up, rather than a shutting down,
so his readers and characters can deeply explore that which most perturbs,
confuses and draws them in. His narrators are humble and self-effacing, but his
prose succeeds at the promise of the best literature: it shows us who we are,
it underscores our common humanity, it is respectful, and perhaps, most of all
– maybe this is just me, I am not sure – it brings incredible comfort and affirmation.
This is what we do, this is who we are. This is. He does all the work for us,
his wisdom presented like a lunch shared with friends, the wine cellared, the
cheese matured, the bread leavened, the salami perfectly smoked. It awaits our
enjoyment with a friend, cooked, prepared, served.
I
cannot recommend more highly Félix’s beautiful collection of short stories, Young
Love. Buy it, read it, tell your friends about it, introduce it to your
reading groups, gift it for Christmas. You will be the better for it, I
guarantee. In strange times, Félix’s prose comforts us, reminds us of our
shared humanity, gives us permission to be what we are, flawed and human. And
hope, in the texture, beauty, light, habits and connections of our day-to-day
existence.
For
all this, I must add that there is something of an enigma, a central mystery at
the heart of all of Félix’s works, and of Félix too. He shows us that while we
are knowable in many ways, there are also parts of us all that are not, and that
this is just the way it is.
Congratulations, Félix!
___
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