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Book Cover for: Inverno, Cynthia Zarin

Inverno

Cynthia Zarin

Critic Reviews

Good

Based on 7 reviews on

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A daring, heartbreaking novel, Inverno is the book that J. D. Salinger's Franny Glass might have written a few decades into her adulthood.

Caroline waited for fifteen minutes in the snow. After a little time had passed, she was simply waiting to see what would happen. It was entirely possible he would not come. If he did not come, she would be in a different story than the one she had imagined, but it was possible, she knew, to imagine anything.

Inverno is a love story that stretches across decades. Inverno is also the story of Caroline, waiting in Central Park in a snowstorm for her phone to ring, yards from where, thirty years ago, Alastair, as a boy, hid in the trees. Will he call? Won't he? The story moves the way the mind does: years flash by in an instant--now we are in the perilous world of fairy tale, now stranded anew in childhood, with its sorrows and harsh words. Ever present are the complicated negotiations of the heart.

This brilliantly original novel by Cynthia Zarin, author of An Enlarged Heart, is a kaleidoscope in which the past and the present shatter. Elliptical and inventive in the mode of Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, Inverno is miraculous and startling. It asks, How does love make and unmake a life?

Book Details

  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Publish Date: Jan 9th, 2024
  • Pages: 144
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.58in - 5.61in - 0.41in - 0.55lb
  • EAN: 9780374610135
  • Categories: LiteraryWomenWorld Literature - American - 21st Century

About the Author

Zarin, Cynthia: - Cynthia Zarin is the author of five books of poetry, including Orbit and The Ada Poems, as well as five books for children and two essay collections, Two Cities and An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award for Poetry, and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, she teaches at Yale University and lives in New York City.

More books by Cynthia Zarin

Book Cover for: Inverno, Cynthia Zarin
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Book Cover for: Saints Among the Animals, Cynthia Zarin
Book Cover for: Orbit: Poems, Cynthia Zarin
Book Cover for: Albert, the Dog Who Liked to Ride in Taxis, Cynthia Zarin
Book Cover for: An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History, Cynthia Zarin
Book Cover for: Two Cities, Cynthia Zarin

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

Praise for Inverno

"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