The End

Jan 13, 2009

Jim rated it

· review of another edition

This book is good, I'd even say brilliant in some parts, but I just didn't like it. I don't think Scibona is trying too hard to be clever, or deep, or thoughtful: I think he IS clever, deep, and thoughtful, but as a novel, I had difficulty tapping into these things because the entire book is so heavily reliant on fanciful language. The first 100 pages were completely inaccessible, and usually if that's the case, I'll put the novel aside, but I was urged on by a few people to continue, so I did...more

like 5 likes

· see review

Nov 20, 2008

John rated it

· review of another edition

Recommends it for: readers who want to know the world in its noisy entirety

Recommended to John by: received the book for review

Shelves: american-novels-that-matter

My God, the sentences of Signore Scibona! Constructions hard-headed yet lovely, precise yet inventive: "Night, for children, was more a place than a time." And: "…Lina was a child. She lacked the natural cruelty that a conversance with the marital act encouraged one to refine." And: "The city was a mammoth trash heap -- even the lake was brown -- but it was an honorable place. It put pretty to one side." THE END is a debut novel -- a runner-up for the current Na...more

like 6 likes

· see review

Feb 17, 2009

Maggie rated it

· review of another edition

One of five finalists for The 2008 National Book Award, The End is an impressive debut whose serpentine plot hovers around a single tumultuous moment during a Catholic street carnival held in an Italian-American enclave of 1953 Cleveland. Amidst a backdrop of racial tensions, poverty and immigration, this pivotal moment ties together the beautifully developed characters who makes up this highly psychological drama: There's Rocco, the town baker, who has just received word that his son has peri...moreOne of five finalists for The 2008 National Book Award, The End is an impressive debut whose serpentine plot hovers around a single tumultuous moment during a Catholic street carnival held in an Italian-American enclave of 1953 Cleveland. Amidst a backdrop of racial tensions, poverty and immigration, this pivotal moment ties together the beautifully developed characters who makes up this highly psychological drama: There's Rocco, the town baker, who has just received word that his son has perished in a Korean POW camp; Mrs. Marini, an elderly abortionist, who is looking for a protégé before she dies and thinks she has found one in Lina, a would-be spinster; and the story's antagonist - a jeweler - who is responsible for a large part of the novel's dread.

In a book that often reads more like an epic, lyric poem than a novel, Scibona's characters become the focus of a piece that is often more psychology than plot. In The End, Scibona seems to be channeling heavyweight modernists such as James Joyce, William Faulkner and T.S. Eliot, so it should follow that his novel is dense, poetic, often awe-inspiring and frequently difficult.

Ultimately, it's the author's sentences that become both his blessing and his curse. The End is comprised of gorgeously opaque sentences, like "If he could denude himself from his mineral self, leaving only caption, he would become at last translucent, transient, timeless," and "I was a fleeting thought the mind that the sea was might light upon and then forget." Scibona's writing is as breathtaking as it is obfuscatory, and, as such, it follows that The End is a novel that demands much of its reader, and one that must be read slowly.

Ultimately, I found The End to be a bit of an enigma. Scibona's writing sparkled, his characters troubled, his story mystified, and he unapologetically tested me as a reader, just like the modernist authors he appeared to be channeling. And as is the case with the work of Eliot and Faulkner, I must be honest and admit that I appreciate what he created more than I enjoyed it.(less)

like 2 likes

· see review

May 22, 2008

mike rated it

· review of another edition

Oh, if only there were another star to give this book. Six stars--that's my rating. I don't mean to raise expectations, but even if I do, The End is going to exceed them. This book accomplishes what I suppose all my favorite books do, maybe what every good book will do, and that is it provides you with a new way of experiencing the world. I'm walking around seeing things differently; I'm a new kind of observer of places and people and the things they do for having spent time with this book. That...more

like 5 likes

· see review

Jan 06, 2009

Gina rated it

· review of another edition

This novel haunted me for weeks. It takes place across the span of several decades, weaving forward and back from a single day in 1953 in Elephant Park, Ohio, in an immigrant neighborhood, and tracking multiple characters who are as doomed as any of the characters in L'Inferno.

like 3 likes

· see review

Apr 05, 2011

Justin Evans rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

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 unrea...moreI 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. (less)

like 1 like

· see review

Oct 17, 2009

Annalisa rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: book-club, literary, historical-fiction

I keep wondering how to rate this and how to feel about it and I'm conflicted. On one hand, I like the idea of a theme being the connection to the story like a symphony, but on the other it felt so disjointed and pointless. Somethings tied together too neatly and others are thrown in with no relevance or conclusion. On one hand, some of the writing is beautiful and thought-provoking and on the other all that introspection with no character development. We never understand anything about the char...more

like 2 likes

· see review

Jan 07, 2009

grant rated it

· review of another edition

A very good book except for one irksome characteristic.
I applaud the ultimate, Prousty point about how we know nothing about others and ourselves, that we make a version of what we are in the present that is no more real than the stories we tell ourselves about who we have been in the past, "we name our reasons for doing, we tell ourselves these private fables, all the time knowing they are at incompletely true."

Yet we are real people inhabiting real places, with pe...more

like

· see review

Aug 31, 2010

Gena rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Full disclosure: Salvatore is a friend, and we wrote letters during the time he was working on this novel, and he included one of my own childhood habits confessed in one of these letters in the pages of the manuscript, so that, in a small way, I am *in this novel*. It is very exciting. When I read the passage, my heart pounded a little. So of course I'm not an objective reader, but then, who is? This is a gorgeous novel. It seems much too wise for a debut, but it was in the works for a lon...more

like 1 like

· see review

Nov 04, 2009

Janessa added it · review of another edition

This is another one of those books that defies the star rating. Scibona takes writing to the level of true art, and for that The End is fascinating and intriguing. However, reading it is difficult. It challenges perceptions, and forces the reader to take an entirely new approach to following story and narrative structure.

The main reason for this is that there really is no narrative structure. The characters and their lives, the causes and effects, do not carry the story toward it...more

like 1 like

· see review

May 09, 2009

Carolyn Kellogg rated it

· review of another edition

Salvatore Scibona's debut novel, "The End," is set in an exquisitely rendered Italian immigrant community in early 20th century Ohio and does not open up so much as catch and slowly reel in. It opens on Assumption Day, 1953; baker Rocco LaGrassa, "a soul liberated from worry by luck and self-conquest," learns his son has died in Korea. He denies the death, insisting that the young man will return home soon, but his rigorous self-deception loosens his carefully held discipline...moreSalvatore Scibona's debut novel, "The End," is set in an exquisitely rendered Italian immigrant community in early 20th century Ohio and does not open up so much as catch and slowly reel in. It opens on Assumption Day, 1953; baker Rocco LaGrassa, "a soul liberated from worry by luck and self-conquest," learns his son has died in Korea. He denies the death, insisting that the young man will return home soon, but his rigorous self-deception loosens his carefully held discipline. For the first time in years, Rocco's solitary routine is disturbed.

Rocco accepts an invitation to dine that same night with an aloof neighbor, Mrs. Marini, and it is through her that the story begins to swirl toward its vortex as it veers across time. Widowed and elderly, Mrs. Marini is helped out around the house by Ciccio, a teenage boy.

The episodic narrative cycles back in time, bringing alive the relationships that connect Mrs. Marini to Ciccio: She is friends with his grandmother Patrizia, she has been a mentor of sorts to his mother, Lina. These ties connect to men too: Umberto, Patrizia's husband, and Lina's husband, Enzo, for whom Mrs. Marini develops a genuine fondness.

Mrs. Marini's affections are hard to come by; having outlived her husband by decades, she maintains a vicious inner dialogue with his imagined, constantly critical ghost; her harsh judgments of others are kind by comparison. But as central as she is, and as difficult, Costanza Marini is not the story's antagonist: That comes in the form of a stranger who appears in two chapters titled "The Forest Runner."

The book focuses on these characters' points of intersection. Teenage Ciccio thinks that "distant events have thrown us into long, elliptical, cometlike orbits, far from our origins, and eventually we will circle back on people whose lives preceded and gave rise to our own." Slowly, a centripetal force builds, drawing together many threads: Ciccio's youth;Lina, single and married; Umberto and Patrizia's farm; Mrs. Marini's affluence.

As deliberately constructed a fiction as "The End" is, it also dabbles in metafiction, making clear, in the text, how it should be read. The quote above is Ciccio's musing on the 19th century death of Lafayette, but it's so instructive that it appears on the inside jacket flap. Lina, who leaves the narrative at one point only to reappear, addresses the reader: "You want a why. But there is no why. . . . I want to be a line that extends and ravels and at length intersects itself again, a path that can be retraced stepwise, but I am not, I am discontinuous."

The title itself points overtly to the novel's heart: The final chapters carry more than their share of emotional heft. But to set the heart of a book at its end leaves the beginning hollow. Rocco is connected to Christian allegory -- Job and Peter, for starters -- but his deliberate unknowingness makes this part of the text harder going than what follows. What's more, he's only tangentially connected to Mrs. Marini and her deeper affections and failures.

"The End" earned a National Book Award nomination, an impressive feat for a first novel. Its careful plotting and graceful language certainly show it to be a work of exquisite control. But its first 65 pages may be hiding its light under a bushel.

Reviewed for the LA Times
November 23, 2008
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-...(less)

like

· see review

May 27, 2011

Fionnuala rated it

Shelves: books-that-marked-me

I imagine, and this book certainly gives permission to imagine in the sense of cogitate, that if Scibona were asked who he was writing for, he might say, for his characters, or for the previous generations who may have inspired those characters, or maybe for the real life place that inspired his multi stranded yet singularly focused story, or for himself. I would be surprised if he said that the reader was foremost in his mind as he was writing. That is a pity as I think the writer of a novel as...more

like

· see review

Sep 24, 2010

Tim Meneely rated it

· review of another edition

Above all, a substantial read about the act of emigration as an ongoing act: it is a story about never arriving.

What does it mean to have come from the Old World? At what cost? The characters, expressing successive generations' experience of this phenomenon, demonstrate the experienced sensation of tacit loss implicit in the battle for freedom of identity. The story echoes the need to break away and gamble on the possibility of discovering one's self as a thinking animal and, inevit...more

like

· see review

Jan 09, 2011

Andrew Smith rated it

· review of another edition

Salvatore Scibona is one of the American writers chosen by The New Yorker for its ’20 Under 40’ feature in 2010. ‘The End’ is all the more impressive for being Scibona’s first novel. But how to explain what I found so remarkable about this book that, on the surface, concerns itself with the Italian immigrant experience during the first half of the 20th century?
Reading this book is a bit like dreaming, but there are none of the puzzling, supposedly metaphoric events that make up dreams — Sc...moreSalvatore Scibona is one of the American writers chosen by The New Yorker for its ’20 Under 40’ feature in 2010. ‘The End’ is all the more impressive for being Scibona’s first novel. But how to explain what I found so remarkable about this book that, on the surface, concerns itself with the Italian immigrant experience during the first half of the 20th century?
Reading this book is a bit like dreaming, but there are none of the puzzling, supposedly metaphoric events that make up dreams — Scibona’s people and places are crystal-clear, actions and events are lucid and comprehensible. It’s just that, from the first sentence, the style of writing evokes a hyper-real world that nevertheless has fantastic elements: “He was five feet one inch tall in street shoes, bearlike in his round and jowly face, hulking in his chest and shoulders, nearly just as stout around the middle, but hollow in the hips, lacking a proper can to sit on (though he was hardly ever known to sit), and wee at the ankles, and girlish at his tiny feet, a man in the shape of a lightbulb.” Illusory, yet vivid.
Often during the reading of this book I experienced the kind of fascination I feel when I watch a Fellini film. As a result of Scibona’s detailed yet idiosyncratic descriptions I sometimes felt that a fantastical baroque movie was running in my head.
Despite all of the above, each of the six related characters seem agonizingly lifelike, their days consist of the stuff of the immigrant dream with its hard grind and heartbreaking sacrifice. The action takes place during five decades, although not necessarily in chronological order. The protaganists all eventually have in common the experience of a day spent at a religious festival in an Italian neighborhood in Ohio in 1953. The day’s events take up much of the novel, but previous details of every character’s earlier experience are so well articulated that I could almost feel the texture of each life as it was lived. A shadowy and violent crime reverberates through the pages and supplies a sense of malevolence that is suspenseful and compelling. Without being preachy or judgemental, Scibona manages to inject spirituality into his characters, which gives the book a metaphysical feel to it. I think the most exciting thing for me about ‘The End’ is that it’s so innovative that I find it impossible to describe in conventional terms. And that’s refreshing!
(less)

like

· see review

Sep 04, 2011

Al rated it

· review of another edition

The End is a thick, textured and poetic novel featuring a connected group of Italian immigrants in the mid 20th century. The writing is beautiful, mysterious and dreamlike. However Scibona leaves the writing too cerebral and obfuscating (vocab word for you!) throughout the first segment of the book. The reader feels isolated, looked down on and utterly unwelcome in the story. After the first third of the book the poetry remains but the details behind it become clearer, but by this point the read...more

like

· see review

Jan 01, 2010

Jennifer rated it

· review of another edition

Interesting multi-view-point story about an Italian immigrant community somewhere in Ohio (Sandusky is nearby, and it's got to be big enough to have a immigrant neighborhoods...maybe Toledo? Or Cleveland?) the stories, of a baker one of whose estranged sons has died in the Korean war (or maybe not), of an elderly woman who performs abortions in the neighborhood, of a young wife who is raped and bears a child then runs away from her husband and son, of the rapist who is a respected jeweler and ...more

like

· see review

Jan 12, 2009

Michael Shilling rated it

· review of another edition

Needs to be read slow. Maps the mythic weave that constructs certain American identities. No I'm not sure what that means either but it feels right to say. A WOW of a book.

like 2 likes

· see review

Oct 25, 2008

Beth rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: 1940s1950s

Despite the fact that this book was written in an accomplished and unique voice, I did not enjoy reading it. To me, it was frustrating and unnecessarily opaque.

like 1 like

· see review

Jul 23, 2010

CJ rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: nytop20under40

I started this book once and set it aside after the first page, which contained a paragraph-long sentence describing the baker. "Ugh," I said and went off to read some non-fiction. After being bolstered by another book, I gave The End another chance, mostly because it's set in Ohio, and I'm kind of a sucker for books and stories set in Ohio.

I'm glad that I gave it another chance. The interwoven stories weren't woven as skillfully as they could have been, and I became disori...more

like

· see review

Apr 16, 2010

Kathrina rated it

Shelves: italian-american

As I should have guessed in this National Book Award Finalist entitled The End, the end actually occurs several times (from various perspectives) in the middle of the book, and the end is actually not an end at all, and leads me to question why I felt so unsatisfied when finally reaching this end that is not an end. There is a reason that the end comes at the end, and god bless it the experiments in structure and form, I still want an end at the end. Scibona is talented in creating character and...more

like

· see review

Nov 10, 2009

Ann rated it

· review of another edition

I couldn't decide between a 4 or a 5. 4 because plot is not the force of this book. The characters are united by the circumstance of fate.
They touch and move away and touch again. One is drawn outside these people, then inside their minds, to dream, to reality which may also be dream. It's a pebble in a pond- the first drop moves out to intersect and finally touch and impact all reality. One is reminded of Kafka or James Joyce (though without the wearying challenge of Joyce). Read th...more

like

· see review

Aug 31, 2011

Jessica Vitela rated it

Shelves: fiction, historical, reviewed-books

Let me defend those 3 stars, starting with a little backstory.

Recently I was following this thread on a livejournal blog and there were several people debating the validity of Young Adult books as suitable fiction for adults. “Can’t you find enjoyable books that aren’t made for 14-year-olds?” someone asked. Now, I’ve read and loved plenty of non-YA stuff, my literary canvas is very all-encompassing, however, it is true that I read quite a lot of YA as well. So thank goodness for the ...more

like

· see review

Sep 08, 2009

Booky Seattlites added it · review of another edition

Shelves: peggy-suggestions, unselected-in-prior-yrs

Full Text :COPYRIGHT 1994 Cahners Business Information

Antonio Tabucchi, translated by Margaret Jull Costa. New Directions, $15.95 (128p) ISBN 0-8112-1270-X

On a sweltering Sunday in July, an Italian writer awaits a midnight rendezvous on a Lisbon quay with the spirit of a dead poet. The nameless narrator of this surreal dreamscape, who anxiously anticipates the appearance of his deceased friend and literary forebear, is Tabucchi himself, and the poet, though never named, ...more

like

· see review

Jul 01, 2010

Open Loop Press added it · review of another edition

Shelves: salvatore-scibona-influences, interviews

If the act of creation is the epitome of elegance, a waltz between the writer’s conscious and unconscious mind, then Salvatore Scibona has performed the dance perfectly. A telephone call to his grandmother on her birthday, a patch of conversation overheard and written down, the view from his writing desk of a clothesline drying laundry — these are this language artist’s broadest strokes, transformed by his conscious mind into crucial, telling details. In “The End,” Scibona’s award-winning first ...moreIf the act of creation is the epitome of elegance, a waltz between the writer’s conscious and unconscious mind, then Salvatore Scibona has performed the dance perfectly. A telephone call to his grandmother on her birthday, a patch of conversation overheard and written down, the view from his writing desk of a clothesline drying laundry — these are this language artist’s broadest strokes, transformed by his conscious mind into crucial, telling details. In “The End,” Scibona’s award-winning first novel, the elaborate weave and turn of story through language whirls the reader through the overlapping lives of five unique characters: an elderly abortionist, an abandoned husband, a teenage boy, an absent mother, a dedicated baker, and a lonely jeweler. In rendering these characters’ lives, Scibona transitions from anecdote to anecdote with implicitly elaborate footwork, the dance of free indirect style, so the gesture comes bearing all the import of direct action, and the absence of events is as telling as their presence.

“The man on the bridge watches her ascending the hill. She is stooped by the weight of an enormous sack on her back, so touchingly like a mule, like an enduring animal that slowly carries on its back a burden as large as itself.
It would be impossibly sweet and satisfying to follow her. The sweetness of saying ’she’ is the intimation of somebody else, of something else that’s really out there being real, that isn’t an idea or a ghost but a person, definite, completed.
But he’s watching her now. He can’t not. And while he watches her, he is turning her back into an idea, so he must act fast. She has already begun to disappear.” (Pg. 112.)

In “The End,” Scibona challenges his characters’ tangibility. He implicitly asks what it means to be perceived. ‘What are the consequences of community?’ The reader wonders, watching these ordinary, extraordinary lives. Is the reflection in the mirror one of comfort? Or does it manifest deep-seated regrets; repetition, routine, anonymity — by what are these broken? We discover, in “The End,” that tragedy is one disruptive mode.

“How long do you have to live in a place before you notice it? The whole morning was a dream. Around every corner was a view that should have been same old, same old, but today impressed itself on his mind as if for the first time and for all time. As in, Look, there’s a kid licking the streetcar tracks, wearing short pants-only it seemed to Rocco that he’d never seen the tracks or a child in short pants before and he was never going to forget this. As on a day when the ruler dies and everybody, without even trying, holds on to the slightest spec of mental lint from that day for years.” (Pgs. 20 – 21.)

Readers of “The End” will find this story about a community lost to time an opportunity for total reading immersion. By the last line, they will know this place and these people in the way they know their own, and they will find in it the satisfaction of particulars, an antidote to the mysterious void.

~Carlin M. Wragg, Editor, Open Loop Press (less)

like

· see review

Jun 02, 2009

Preeta rated it

· review of another edition

Well, I read this slowly, like Michael said (I read everything slowly anyway), but I'm still not sure about it. The opening is absolutely one of the most brilliant passages of writing I've ever read, and there was no way I was not reading this book after that. I keep going back and reading it again and again like it's a poem. But then... Scibona takes some risks I've never seen before; there are very few books about which one can say, wow, this really is doing something NEW, and I think this ...moreWell, I read this slowly, like Michael said (I read everything slowly anyway), but I'm still not sure about it. The opening is absolutely one of the most brilliant passages of writing I've ever read, and there was no way I was not reading this book after that. I keep going back and reading it again and again like it's a poem. But then... Scibona takes some risks I've never seen before; there are very few books about which one can say, wow, this really is doing something NEW, and I think this is one of them. For that reason alone, I'd recommend this to any writer. But some of those risks paid off, for me, and others just left me puzzled/cold. I still don't quite buy the connections and attachments between even the main characters (let alone the shadowy minor figures -- Gary? Eddie? Who? -- that drift into the narrative three quarters of the way through the book); it seemed that even the strongest of attachments tended to be *explained* in philosophical terms rather than demonstrated. Often I found myself wondering how these diverse characters could all be having these very similar abstract thoughts about the nature of being and matter and memory. And I felt a little starved for a good story in the end -- there *is* a story underneath everything, a story we keep coming back to and see from several different perspectives, but it didn't sustain me, and I just wanted to spend more time with Rocco the baker of breads with and without seeds (what an amazing line!).

But yes, I do feel like my mind has been expanded by this reading experience, and maybe it just needs to settle before I can assess its full effects on me. The writing is brilliant in many places, full of pithy summations of simple truths I had never seen articulated before. And while I wasn't sold on some of Scibona's attempts to get right inside his characters' roiling heads (Mrs. Marini's conversations with the figure who is possibly her dead husband, for instance? Um...), some of them were breathtaking, as with the teenage boy, Ciccio. Amazing stuff in those chapters, utterly convincing.(less)

like

· see review

Aug 06, 2010

Kay rated it

· review of another edition

Strange book...gorgeously written yet distancing -- perhaps deliberately so. I proposed this for my book group and am sorry it wasn't chosen. I'd have loved to see what everyone made of it, and in fact I wish someone I know had read it. The old father/grandfather from Italy may have been my favorite character...perhaps because there was something endearing about him in contrast to just about everyone else. It felt a bit like a disorienting dream.

like

· see review

Aug 05, 2011

Leslie rated it

· review of another edition

Reminds me somewhat of Let the Great World Spin - the intersection of lives on a particular day. Higher level of complexity though because of its Modernist concerns with time and language. I have read others' comments that "The End" is reminiscent of Faulkner, Joyce, and Woolfe. I kept thinking Chekov. Certainly could be considered a Regionalist work too - place is of utmost importance. Don't plan on sleepwalking through this.

like

· see review

Jul 24, 2010

Parvoneh rated it

· review of another edition

Really, really well done. I don't know why I'm not giving this five stars.

This novel covers a lot of ground (explicit musing on the abject and language; narrative voice and chapters switching to focus on four or five characters and their somewhat overlapping lives) and manages to be mysterious and thoughtful and generally great storytelling. At times it's beautiful. Mostly it feels like thinking about a bruise--distance, some pain, without being excessive, and some hurt and love in the...more

like

· see review

Jun 13, 2011

Molly rated it

"She refreshed the water every ten minutes, draining a little and refilling, reading the book cover to cover, until she could have peeled her toenails out of their slots." pg 194

This book felt shelled; I couldn't quite penetrate the hull. Some of the language sparkled through, and I love a good character study. But I simply found myself befuddled at what exactly was going on, and I know my assessment isn't entirely fair, as I only read in fits and spurts between diaper c...more

like

· see review

Jan 08, 2010

Carol rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: 2010

I had a tough time with this book. His prose is wonderfully formed and the flow of the sentences well crafted. The story did not hold together for me. One of the reviews on the back cover compared him to Virgina Wolff. I did not find that to be so. Her imagery made her stories. You could clearly feel her characters. I felt his story was too dreamlike...almost hypnotic. The characters did not seem to connect with each other. I did like the setting in Cleveland. I would try another book by him jus...more

like

· see review

title link	preview: The End
avg rating	preview: The End Goodreads rating: 3.52 (291 ratings)
small image	preview: click here [close]
med image	preview: click here [close]
BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7011965-the-end?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1267002765m/7011965.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7011965-the-end?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]The End by Salvatore Scibona[/url]

The End

Friend Reviews

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topic
Discuss This Book

combine
Other Editions (8)

Genres

Readers Also Enjoyed

Books by Salvatore Scibona

Share This Book

Share This Book on Your Website

Trivia About The End

Groups That Shelved The End

The End

Friend Reviews

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topicDiscuss This Book

combine Other Editions (8)

Genres

Readers Also Enjoyed

Books by Salvatore Scibona

Share This Book

Share This Book on Your Website

Trivia About The End

Groups That Shelved The End

new topic
Discuss This Book

combine
Other Editions (8)