Brotherhood Of The Grape

Description

Henry Molise, a 50 year old, successful writer, returns to the family home to help with the latest drama; his aging parents want to divorce. Henry's tyrannical, brick laying father, Nick, though weak and alcoholic, can still strike fear into the hearts of his sons. His mother, though ill and devout to her Catholicism, still has the power to comfort and confuse her children. This is typical of Fante's novels, it's autobiographical, and brimming with love, death, violence and religion. Writing with great passion Fante powerfully hits home the damage family can wreck upon us all.

Born in Denver on 8 April 1909, John Fante migrated to Los Angeles in his early twenties. Classically out of place in a town built on celluloid dreams, Fante's literary fiction was full of torn grace and redemptive vengeance..Wait Until Spring, Bandini.(1938), his first novel, began the saga of Arturo Bandini, a character whose story continues in.The Road to Los Angeles,.Ask the Dust.and.Dreams from Bunker Hill.- collectively known as.The Bandini Quartet. Fante published several other novels, as well as stories, novellas and screenplays in his seventy-four years, including.The Brotherhood of the Grape.(1977) and.1933 Was A Bad Year.(posthumously, 1985). He was posthumously recognised in 1987 with a Lifetime Achievement Award by PEN in Los Angeles, four years after his death from diabetes-related complications.

* Fante's searing, effortless style eschewed the refinement of Fitzgerald, the hubris of Hemingway and the panoramic vistas of Dos Passos. Instead he marshalled the raw materials of his own life - poverty, sex, paternal hatred, Catholic guilt, misplaced pride, hard drinking, labour, fighting, overarching literary ambition and the internecine hatred within immigrant communities in pre-war America - rendering the pain and comedy with such heartbreaking simplicity as to brook no hint of the literary zeitgeist. Dazed & Confused * John Fante takes some beating ... mean, moody, disturbing and intensely atmospheric. The Times * John Fante knew how to make words sing. When he was on form, he could write sentences that stopped time. Uncut * Bandini is a magnificent creation, and his rediscovery is not before time. Times Literary Supplement * Fante was my God. -- Charles Bukowski