An excerpt from a novel-in-progress, with the working title of Alfonso, set in Sydney between 1962 and 1972. The protagonist is a man from the northwest of Spain who migrates to Australia to escape poverty. When he arrives in Australia, he confronts language problems, homesickness, and isolation. He works as a carpenter and eventually buys a house in Surry Hills, unaware of the cost and commitment associated with old houses and feuding neighbours. When the house renovation is finished, he meets a woman and they fall in love, but the woman leaves for England. The story then traces his search for love; in the process, he finds a place to belong in his new country. More than a love story, this is a novel about the migrant experience, in which all that is known is forfeited in the search for material security.
Tenderly rendered, haunting, compassionate tales from a new voice down under. Haunting, because like the best of Spanish writers, Felix's work embodies duende, or what I call aesthetic darkness. Lorca wrote that "duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, 'The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.' Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living s...more
In the native tongue of Tahiti, Ponui means "the immense night." Although Po is darkness and night, this darkness is not evil, but good and nurturing, as are the earth and the womb. Po is the creative world of night, the magical, immense and dark womb from whence our dreaming, our lovemaking, and our visions of spirits blossom forth.
Haunting the soul of much Spanish literature dwells Po by another name: duende, 'aesthetic darkness.' Lorca wrote that "duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, 'The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.' Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation." He suggests, "everything that has black sounds in it, has duende, i.e., emotional 'darkness.' Immense, sense-consuming darkness, proclaims Indian's great scripture of Tantra yoga, The Vijnana Bhairava Sutras simply does not support the quotidian, day-to-day thoughts that plague the mind of an aspiring yogi. So that on a moonless monsoon night, when one cannot see the even nose of one's lover, the mind may find itself transcending into the great mystery beyond thought.
And this is what is miraculous about work of Felix Calvino, a Spanish-Australian writer of great depth. His tenderly rendered, haunting, compassionate tales, like those of the best Spanish writers, are often tinted with the indwelling, dark allure of duende. Yet, duende is felt in Felix's prose through his characters' day-to-day struggles with such fundamental givens as identity. And one senses in one's gut that with Felix it is not a question of ability, but of true living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of the writer's dark nostalgia for the millenia-old mysterious ways of Spanish village life. I invite you to acquaint yourself with this gifted writer. You will discover a deeply authentic voice. It may continue to haunt you long after you have read the last word.
Felix Calvino, a current MPhil student, was the recipient of the inaugural Cecilie Anne Sloane Postgraduate English Creative Writing Research Scholarship…
Congratulations to recipients of MRC Next StepJoin Us
Producer Alexandra Blue and Writer/Director Dimitrios Pouliotis were the successful team selected for $25,000 investment from the MRC for their 15 minute film Unfinished Thoughts, based on a short story by Felix Calvino.
Funding was made up of $15,000 in cash from MRC and $5,000 equipment hire from Picture Hire and MRC, as well as $5,000 in post production equipment and/or facilities from Oasis Post.
Production is scheduled to commence in November 2010.
This review is from: The Mix Tape (Perfect Paperback)
THE MIX TAPE is from the series FLASH FORWARD: A Collection of Flash Fiction - 2010 and is a winner from the cover design, to the concept of dividing the book in two parts - one opens from the front, the other flips the book and turns is upside down for part 2. Inside this little treasure trove are what seem like hundreds of very brief 'novels' compressed into 1 to 4 pages. Within this context the many authors served up here find the ability to create an entire story that because of the abbreviated format carries such a wallop that it takes a moment to breathe before the next one.
The microstories range from high comedy to sensitive melodrama, to bizarre animals, funerals, Holocaust, teen pregnancies, religion - almost every imaginable topic is surveyed with astonishingly fine writing. Some of the stand out works include a brief look at an encounter with possible love angles that ends unexpectedly by Felix Calvino (‘In the Park’), several stories from Nancy Stohlman ('Clowning for Jesus' is bound to become a classic) whose flirtations with being naughty ('Donny and Marie Osmond Barbie') vie with those of Kona Morris ('Confession #3', 'Going Back') or stories by Sophie Rosenblum ('A Terrier's Limits' et al). To have the luxury to savor such creativity within the covers of one book is a feast. Let's hope these 'Fast Forwards' continue! Editors K. Scott Forman, Kona Morris, and Nancy Stohlman have done a superb job in arresting the talents of many terrific writers. Grady Harp, July 10
Echoing the biography of its author, Félix Calviño’s A Hatful of Cherries is perhaps most notable for its intriguing juxtaposition of Spanish and Australian cultures. Of the sixteen short stories collected here, ten are set in Spain, where Calvino was raised and from which he fled military service during the deadly Spanish Civil War; six take place in Australia, where Calviño has lived since the 1960s. The majority of the Spanish stories chronicle the hardships and small joys of village life, while the Australian stories investigate the lives of lonely, immigrant men navigating unfamiliar terrain. While these lines of demarcation lead to obvious differences in content, the stories also have a vibrant through line constructed of the humanity and wisdom of the characters, and of Calviño himself.
The well-drawn characters and their relationships are the clear highlight of the collection. The Spanish stories are rich with familial love overcoming the bitter experience of life, such as in “The Swallows,” when a young boy is taught of the mystery and beauty of nature by his wise and kind-hearted grandfather.
Stories such as “An Old Sheep” and “Basilio” extend this love into the larger community, gracefully illustrating the mutual generosity necessary to rural survival, while “A Hatful of Cherries” and “Silvia” offer elegant reflections on the beauty and turmoil of romance. The Australian stories offer vivid portrayals of the immigrant experience and of mateship, as in the excellent “A New Place,” where a group of immigrant friends go out to a nightclub in search of female companionship, and the narrator catches a brief glimpse of true love, only to watch it vanish into the crowd.
Calviño brings a well-developed craft to the portrayal of these characters, their situations and inner lives. His style is gentle, full of respect for life’s mysteries, with phrase-making abilities that reveal the enigmas of existence concisely and profoundly. In “An Old Sheep,” four sentences describing a shepherd’s home summarize his life’s luck and misery completely: “The room was cold in winter and hot in summer. It was always dark. Tired twinkles of light came through the fissures in the roof tiles. A small window looked out into the trees”(33). In “A New Place,” the simple words “I can cook” (43) convey a lifetime of desire and uncertainty. “The stars are her eyes,” says Grandpa at the end of “The Swallows” (182), intimating to the young narrator all the magic of living things. Moments such as these abound throughout the collection, and elevate moments of dull living into transcendence.
At times, however, these moments can feel too few and far between in Calviño’s work. These are stories of reflection; narration is normally at a great remove from events, and exposition is given weight at the expense of scene. “Silvia” concerns a pregnancy creating love triangle between two male friends and the title character, with endless opportunities for languorous scenes which illustrate the emotional joys and conflicts of the situation. One paragraph describes Silvia as “seated in an easy chair in the living room against beautiful tapestries, the colours of which brought deep repose to the mind,” and notes that this is an occasion Alfredo “reminisced many years later” (158). While Alfredo’s memory does paint a lovely image, it also suggests the opportunity for a more fully realized scene, one which might bring readers into that living room, to experience its beauty without the mediation of Alfredo’s mind. Similarly, the story “Basilio”—one of the strongest pieces in the collection—brings home the deadly aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, but it does very little to recreate the atrocities of the war itself. Basilio reminisces about the number of dead and summarizes some of the killings, but never does he experience a flash back or some other trick of narration that might intensify the story’s sorrowful themes. “Ghosts on the Beach” draws in the reader because of its anomalous setting—the afterlife—but it fails to develop its most interesting theme that of romantic love between ghosts. The resolutions of many of the stories feel incomplete or unsatisfactory, unwilling to mine the characters’ lives for their most resonant and lasting legacies.
The finest of the stories are those which deliver a heightened sense of irony, proposing some unexpected twist in the beauty of life in villages, in new homelands, and elsewhere. “Winners and Losers,” the story of a lost wallet, is among the best in this regard. After the narrator loses his wallet, his mates at a local pub place bets on how much
of its monetary contents will return. Meanwhile, the narrator, interested in the stories of poor men, is taken on a tour of food missions in the area by his friend Henry. The story becomes an examination of the nature of luck and circumstance in the lives of men, buoyed by the narrator’s generous nature toward others. Just as he seems to have reconciled bad luck as a simple fact of an otherwise good life, his wallet turns up with a surprise of its own. “Basilio,” “Restless Hands,” and “Silvia” are other stories which resolve in a manner addressing life’s complexities, at home and abroad. Here Calviño’s well-crafted folk tales brush against the unexpected and the unusual, giving birth to masterful, illuminating art.