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Salvatore Scibona

Auteur van The End

5+ Werken 331 Leden 10 Besprekingen

Werken van Salvatore Scibona

The End (2008) 235 exemplaren
The Volunteer: A Novel (2019) 92 exemplaren
O Fim (Portuguese Edition) (2021) 2 exemplaren
Kraj 1 exemplaar
Der Freiwillige: Roman (2021) 1 exemplaar

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I had just picked this up randomly from a Little Free Library, the synopsis on the dust jacket sounded interesting. I think the best way to describe it would be to say that it is a well written case study of the developmental consequences on children of the manner and environment in which they were raised. I know that sounds like an exciting read, but it actually is. There are a few places where the story seems to wander a bit, but overall I quite enjoyed it.
½
 
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hhornblower | 2 andere besprekingen | Feb 25, 2023 |
The Volunteer begins with an enigma--a young boy is left abandoned at an airport, speaking an unintelligible language, with his father nowhere to be found. Who is this boy? How did he get here? Why? The answers to all these questions begin many years earlier with the story of Vollie Frade, who joined the Marine Corps during the height of the Vietnam War. We follow Frade through the jungles of SEA as he witnesses and partakes in the horrors of war, and their lasting aftermath. Salvatore Scibona has created a great work of modern literature, with his lyrical use of language to captivate the reader and his insights into the effects of war and the fringes of society.

Full disclosure: I received a free advance reading copy of The Volunteer through Goodread's Giveaways, and my rating is based on an uncorrected proof. The Volunteer will be available in bookstores on March 15, 2019.
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hianbai | 2 andere besprekingen | May 28, 2020 |
For more reviews and bookish posts please visit: http://www.ManOfLaBook.com

The Volunteer by Salvatore Scibona is a generational saga, spanning about 100 years in which the effects of the Vietnam War are felt. Mr. Scibona is an award winning American author and writer of short stories.

A young boy is stranded at Hamburg Fuhlsbuettel Airport in 2010. He speaks no German and it seems as if he was abandoned.

Vollie Frade, nicknamed “Vollie” because he volunteered for the war instead of being drafted, forges his father’s signature to enlist instead of being drafted. Vollie just wants out of his home in Iowa and maybe even get a sense of who he really is.

In Vietnam, Volie meets Lorch, a spy who recruits him for a secret government operation in Queens, NY. Escaping from Lorch’s clutches, Vollie finds himself in New Mexico and in love with Louisa. Vollie also raises Louisa’s son, a violent teen, turned violent man who himself finds a life in the military and keeps on volunteering for tours of duty in the Middle East.

The Volunteer by Salvatore Scibona is a man’s novel. A book about men, the intimate relationships of one to himself, fathers and sons and how the traumatic effects of one generation affect the next, and even the one after that.

This is a sprawling story, which moves through geography, culture, and time in a deliberate, yet non-linear manner. The author allows us to see how men see themselves, and how the mind works allowing the characters to wander outside of themselves into places which do not exist.

The theme of disappearing seems to be a constant throughout this novel. Vollie seems to always try to disappear, he runs away to the Marines, shamed by his parents’ illiteracy, disappears from a secret government job, and even his family, but he always finds out, sometimes too late, that his disappearing act was often a decades long illusion. Vollie’s son also try to disappear, or make others disappear without really understanding why.

The book seem to ramble on at some parts, soliloquies of the characters thinking, or society’s reflection upon itself. Taken in context though, getting into the mind of a character including the artificial walls he builds around himself, his memories (real or not) as well as dreams creates a confidential relationship between the readers and the characters they are reading about.
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ZoharLaor | 2 andere besprekingen | Apr 3, 2019 |
I remember reading in a review of Bellow's letters the idea that some writers can craft remarkable sentences, but can't write a paragraph to save their life. I guess you can broaden that theme: some people can write a great statements, but not much in the way of dialogue. Scibona is clearly a sentence and statement guy. Part of this is because this book is so overwhelmingly narrated as interior monologue. If he'd made it too ordered or comprehensible, some people would complain that it was unrealistic or too rational or something, and paragraphs and dialogue tend to be ordered and comprehensible. Part of it is that had he been born in the nineteenth century he would have been a poet, rather than writing prose, such is his love of words. Sadly, as with way too many literary writers, his characters think about words to an excessive and, to be honest, dull extent. To his credit, the character who thinks about words the most is a sociopath, which seems to me to be the logical outcome of thinking that the word/world relationship is really, really important. Is all this the effect of writing workshops? There's an idiotic English major term paper in that.

So, plot. A certain kind of reader will complain that 'nothing happens,' that there's too much reflection. A different kind of reader will applaud the fact that SS puts so much weight on thinking and memory. They're both wrong: this book's most remarkable characteristic is the incredible *density* of the plot. This is what a Victorian novel looks like if - as we've all wished had happened - it had been edited by a modernist. The plot remains, but it's told by memories and allusion rather than endless longeurs. Result: rather than 900 pages, 300. The touchstones? Woolf and Joyce. The problem? The structure becomes rebarbative and less rewarding than it could have been. Whereas Ulysses eases you in with the Daedalus chapters, The End gives you its Bloom (called Rocco) up front, with no warning, and no connection to the remainder of the book except for a couple of chance encounters. That's a tough start. Through the middle you get lots of logophilia and interior monologue. Ulysses ends in a bang with its famous 'feminine' stream of consciousness sentence; The End also closes with a feminine monologue, but here it's a whimper. Not much of an end.

All that said, it's nice that someone wants to write difficult, challenging fiction. I'll buy his next book the day it's released and dedicate a week to reading it, in the hope that the ambition remains, his logorrhea is cured and there's less hedging about undecidability or ambiguity or whatever the latest, hippest relativists are calling it.

PLOT SPOILERS: Based on the similarity in their structure, my utterly unfounded suspicion is that The End is a kind of answer to the optimism, if you will, of Ulysses. The main events here are war, abortion, rape, a lynching, a suicide and serial abandonment. The apolitical interracial love-in is replaced with racism and hatred. That makes it more honest than Joyce, which is a big tick in my book. I'd like to know what someone more familiar than I am with Ulysses makes of The End.
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stillatim | 6 andere besprekingen | Dec 29, 2013 |

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Statistieken

Werken
5
Ook door
2
Leden
331
Populariteit
#71,753
Waardering
½ 3.5
Besprekingen
10
ISBNs
28
Talen
4

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