Rocco LaGrassa was ‘stout around the middle . . . wee at the ankles, and girlish at his tiny feet, a man in the shape of a lightbulb’. In Salvatore Scibona’s first novel we join this lightbulb of a man on perhaps his darkest day: the day on which the police arrive at his door to tell him his son has just died of tuberculosis in a prisoner-of-war camp in North Korea.
Rocco LaGrassa was ‘stout around the middle . . . wee at the ankles, and girlish at his tiny feet, a man in the shape of a lightbulb’. In Salvatore Scibona’s first novel we join this lightbulb of a man on perhaps his darkest day: the day on which the police arrive at his door to tell him his son has just died of tuberculosis in a prisoner-of-war camp in North Korea.
Rocco is the first of five characters whom this stream-of-consciousness novel follows. Over the course of one day, through the heat and activity of 15 August 1953, we also meet an elderly abortionist, a seamstress, a teenager and a jeweller, whose narrative threads cross and increasingly entangle as the day progresses.
To attempt such a book is a bold move; not because it is a novel novelistic idea but because it is precisely the opposite. To write a stream-of-consciousness story set over one day immediately invites comparisons with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
It is a mark of how good a writer Scibona is that he survives such comparisons. Though there are moments when the streams run a little too opaque, there are many more when they are brilliant. For example, when the tubby Rocco answers the door to the police, he is not wearing a shirt.
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