Scibona and Amazon Acquisitions

My wife and I have recently sought to increase our reading credentials by actually budgeting a certain amount each month for new book acquisition. This is generously funded by DirecTV who will no longer be getting their monthly donation. It's amazing how important the death of the television was to get us started reading, and how effortless it has become to read more without the hypnotic blue flicker.

In any event, I was dead set on getting my hands on God's Own Country by Ross Raisin. I had read about it at dovegreyreader scribbles, and was sorely disappointed to find out it wasn't yet available in the United States. Little did I know, and I'm sharing it with you now, customers of amazon.com can order books through amazon.co.uk with their existing amazon account! The price was in the normal range after the currency exchange, the credit card charged less than a dollar in exchange fees, and the shipping was 2-3 days. Presto! As you can see to the left, I now have the book in hand. (Before making any large purchases of your own, I advise you to check with your credit card company about exchange fees. I've heard some harrowing tales.) After that effort, though, I learned the book has been released under a different title, Out Backward, stateside. Still a great tidbit of information, though!

While waiting for what felt like my illicit acquistion of international literature, I pilfered the wife's recent acquisitions and ended up reading The End by Salvatore Scibona. It's Scibona's first novel, and an authentically applied sticker tells me it was a National Book Award finalist. Not hard to see why, really. The book was a quick read and rarely provided a stopping point at which I was satisfied to take a break. Following the crossing paths of 3 generations of Italian immigrants, the story zig zags through time relaying parallel stories about the various characters.

Scibona deals heavily with questions of character and destiny. It seems to me that he's suggesting the two are not inextricably linked. All of his prominent characters exhibit dramatic, conflicting stages in their lives in which their character is undermined, thrown off, and a new direction is chosen. Mrs. Marini, an old woman who ties many of the otherwise unrelated characters together, reflects on her pivotal changes as "a swerve." Like the swerve Lucretius used to describe the origin of the universe in On the Nature of Things, it's unclear what gives rise to this aberration that sets of a chain of events in personality (a traditionally intellectual and snooty interpretation is that this swerve is the inclusion of free will by Lucretius), but something seems familiar and right about Scibona's presentation of the human experience. Each phase of life provides us with the opportunity for a new direction born from the ashes of the previous.

On a lighter note, The End is set in Ohio, and makes frequent reference to my hometown. Not often that an almost-prize-winning novel find its way to Ashtabula. One can't help but wonder if a more glamorous town might have secured the prize for Scibona...