2023-10-07
A woman is standing in the snow waiting for a phone call; that much is clear.
Zarin, a poet and essayist, demonstrates little interest in conventional storytelling in her debut novel, which revolves around a couple named Caroline and Alastair and their romantic attachment of 50-plus years, returning frequently to a moment in the middle of that period when Caroline was standing in the snow waiting for him to call, but also pinging back and forth among other apparently important moments—one says "apparently" because it's hard to tell what the point is. For example, there's this: "Caroline is standing in the snow in her fur hat and fur boots waiting for Alastair to call, a few yards from where thirty years before he hacked at the frozen roots of a locust tree with his penknife, and cut his arm." And this: "Caroline is standing in the snow in her fur boots and hat. It is February. It is exactly halfway between the time she saw Alastair again, the previous November, after twenty-five years, and when she would see him for the last time, the following November." And then this: "You have left Caroline in the snow: you have left two characters, standing around! Say the rest of what happened so we can move on." Interspersed with this is a lot of other mysterious stuff: an extended retelling of H.C. Andersen's The Snow Queen, where Gerda and Kai may or may not represent Alastair and Caroline; a critical review of popular music about phone calls; a recounting of the plot of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with special attention to the line "I’d rather skip that scene, if you don’t mind." In the movie, this line is delivered by a character who's telling Butch she doesn't want him to die, but takes on another, more immediate, meaning in its half-dozen repetitions here.
Somewhere are probably readers who would enjoy this book. May it find them.
Praise for Inverno
"I would in fact recommend this book to any reader for whom a chief pleasure to be found in literature is beautiful sentences. The elegance and incantatory power of Zarin’s prose, along with her virtuosity at observation, are undeniable . . . Love and time. Each is commonly said to have the power to heal, but Inverno is all about that other power they share: to annihilate . . . To see the chaos of suffering shaped into something beautiful is one of the main reasons we turn to art. There is not a banal sentence or purple patch to be found in this book, which only a poet could have written." —Sigrid Nunez, New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
"A beautiful, tricky, compressed gem of a book that seems determined to upend your expectations of it . . . Though Inverno is Zarin’s first novel, it carries the grace and intellectual heft of her decades as a poet . . . Its stream-of-consciousness narration evokes Virginia Woolf or Italo Calvino." —Mark Athitakis, The Washington Post
"Incantatory . . . This book invites us to keep reading, on the alert for deliberately dropped gems that mark a path onward. As with Ms. Zarin’s poetry, close attention proves rewarding—the small revelations accumulate. Inverno gradually builds to a heartbreaking portrait of a mind trying to wrap itself around a tenacious yet hopeless dynamic . . . This shimmering exploration of time and memory adroitly captures the persistent ache of intractable yearning." —Heller McAlpin, The Wall Street Journal
"Zarin’s point, perhaps, is that life-changing love affairs mushroom out beyond the moments spent together. Full of gorgeous descriptions, fascinating characters, and impressive allusions to fairy tales, Robert Redford movies, Girl Scouts, Blondie, and more, Inverno is intellectual, acrobatic, and fascinating." —Annie Tully, Booklist
"There is no straight path to (and from) love; Zarin’s prose reminds us to treat this idea with reverence—to tell this story, no matter how difficult, both on and off the page."—Rachel Schwartzmann, BOMB Magazine
"A sly and beguiling love story doubling as a meditation on the nature of time . . . [A] lovely exploration of the limits of love and the unlimited scope of memory and imagination." —Publishers Weekly
"Zarin’s mesmerizing voice (could anyone else dedicate a full page to the sensuous nature of the black rotary telephone?) ensnares the imagination to the point where readers will be happy to imagine the plot that suits them best . . . [Inverno] will thrill those who revel in intoxicating language." —Library Journal
"A brilliant incantation to undying love, where love is a promise that time can't keep but cannot break. Love does not heal, is not muted by regrets, shame, or denial, and is forever revived where we wanted it chilled and dead. To use Cynthia Zarin’s word, love annihilates." —André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name
"Haunting, elegant, driven through with yearning and simmering tension: this is a beautifully evocative reckoning with the memories, repetitions and fictions that form our lives." —Francesca Wade, author of Square Haunting: Five Women Writers in London Between the Wars
"Cynthia Zarin’s Inverno is a dazzlingly beautiful, heartbreaking invocation of love, life, and the infinite ways in which the two intersect. Writers capable of producing fabulous prose are rare. Writers who bring a laser-sharp eye to the complexities of living in the world among others, and to the various collisions of past and present, are rare as well. A writer like Zarin, who can do both, is the rarest of all. I loved every line in this book." —Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours and A Wild Swan and Other Tales
Praise for Cynthia Zarin
"There were moments throughout An Enlarged Heart that reminded me of Didion at her elegiac best, which is perhaps the finest compliment I know how to pay an essayist." —Christopher Beha, The New York Times
“Zarin knits her stories together with an appealing and deeply intimate voice.” —Suzanne Koven, The Boston Globe
