Rating: 4/5
This was a brilliant book if not a little inconsistent in its brilliancy. I really liked the flowing narrative between different characters, sometimes even in the same paragraph. The chapters are like songs where you can evaluate them on their own. Chapter 8 might be the single best piece of writing I have ever come across in the history of human literature. I personally enjoyed most the parts we were following Svevo and not so much the others. Can’t wait to read the rest of the series. Bukowski sang high praise of Fante and now I can see why. As far as greatest writers, he’s right up there with Miller and Buk if you’re into this style of hyper-reality black humour beauty fiction that is disguised as novel but really is memoir. That said, Fante is uniqe and perhaps unparallelled in his ability to construct paragraphs and sentences that seem to be much more than the sum of their parts.