Several Unbridled Books that I’ve enjoyed include Last Night in Montreal and The Singer’s Gun (both written by Emily St. John Mandel), In Hovering Flight(written by Joyce Hinnefeld; my review was blurbed on the paperback … how cool is that?!), 31 Hours (written by Masha Hamilton, whose work in founding the Afghan Women’s Writing Project is inspiring), and The Islands of Divine Music, written by John Addiego, whose most recent novel, Tears of the Mountain, was published a few months ago; I’m looking forward to reading it!

Today John joins us with a fun romp through “what if.”  When asked what author, dead or alive, he’d invite to a holiday dinner, he also shared a recipe for what he’d serve at that meal! John’s essay incorporates his family and the inspiration for his choice of guest and meal.  Read along, I think you’ll agree that you’d like to be a fly on the wall (or a guest at the table!) at this meal:

The author of The Barron in the Trees and The Cloven Knight might find my choice of words interesting here: I would love to have him for a delicious Mexican dinner.

Calvino is one of my favorite writers. Shortly before his death in 1985 he began a collection of five stories about the senses, finishing only three. Under the Jaguar Sun (about the tongue) was a gastronomic description of Mexico in which, after much exploration of an Aztec history of daily human sacrifice, one suspects that the regional cuisine, with its heavy and exotic spices, was developed to disguise, or enhance, the consumption of all that young human flesh being thrown off the pyramids.

To put everybody at ease, I would feed Calvino this meatless recipe my daughter Emily picked up while studying in Mexico. She was raised on Calvino’s Italian Folktales; I read them to her night after night. We both love the magic and humor in all of his work, the way he blends fable and realism, the way something very familiarly Italian pervades the tone: the peasant wisdom, the foibles of the powerful, and the courage of girls facing ogres and evil princes with silver noses.

So, I would love to listen to Calvino describe his work and his life over this simple meal from the center of colonial Mexico.

Enchiladas Quereteranas

• 10 corn tortillas
• 2 potatoes
• 4 carrots
• 1 head of lettuce
• 1 onion, chopped
• 4 cups cojita cheese, shredded
• 2 cloves garlic
• 6-8 ancho chiles, dried
• 2-3 cups warm water
• pinch of salt
• crema mexicana

1. Cut the potatoes and carrots into chunks and steam until tender. Set aside.
2. To make sauce, remove stems and seeds from chiles and soak them in water. When they are rehydrated, blend chiles, water salt, garlic, and half the onion. Sauce should be thin but not watery.
3. Mix together remaining chopped onion and cheese.
4. In a large skillet, heat a few tbsp of oil medium heat. Dip 2 tortillas in the sauce so they are coated on both sides and fry them flat for about 30 seconds. Spoon 2-3 tbsp of the cheese and onion mixture onto tortillas and fold them over. Fry for another minute or until cheese melts. Tortillas shouldn’t harden; if they do, they’ve been cooked too long, so remove from pan as soon as cheese melts. Repeat this process with the rest of the tortillas.
5. Serve enchiladas on a bed of lettuce with potato and carrot pieces. Top with crema mexicana and any remaining cheese.

Yum!  Thank you, John, for sharing both your family story and this favorite recipe.  And, of course, for the assurance that none of the ingredients originated from the pyramids

Feliz Año Nuevo!

I’m so pleased to have John Addiego as my guest on “She is Too Fond of Books” today.  John is the author of The Islands of Divine Music, published by Unbridled Books in October 2008 and reviewed here.  Read on to learn more about John and his writing, the foundations of The Islands of Divine Music, and his writing closet!  (photo of John is from his website)

John, welcome to “She is Too Fond of Books,” I was taken by the construct of The Islands of Divine Music and the characters that were woven through the years in the stories.  Can you tell us a little about the genesis of this book?

I made a lot of false starts with this basic material when I was young, coming largely from personal and family experience, usually with young men of my age figuring prominently. I’m grateful some early coming-of-age attempts never got published. At some point I got a better sense of personae and was able to step out of my personal plight a little, I think. I felt like I had some characters, entirely fictional people, even if they sounded at times a bit like people from my life, who I could put in hard situations. I wanted each of them to have some experience that brought them in touch with the divine.

I understand that some of the chapters were previously published as independent short stories; when did you know that Rosari’s flight to America would be the beginning of this larger work and that she would be the backbone of the family?

Six of the chapters were published as stories, some in slightly different form, in literary magazines. I wrote the story about Giuseppe and the Immaculate Conception first. The Rosari character was foundational in my sense of the family, and I had ideas for ending with her as a matriarchal old woman; however, somewhere along the process I realized that I wanted to start with her as a little girl in the Old Country. In part this is because I have spent a good deal of time raising a daughter as a single parent, and I have some sense of the courage of little girls. It was the image of that little girl who inspired the novel as a whole more than any other character.

Your character sketches are wonderful, and each chapter has the feeling of family lore or a tale passed through the generations.  Have you researched you own family history and come across any rumors or tales-half-told that you’d like to finish in a creative way?

Thank you very much! I am not a good family historian-my brother and sister are much better-but we have a shared a fascination for our family background on both sides of our lineage. The shoeshine boy in the earthquake and the disappearing mother come from some family stories. I’ve taken enormous poetic license.

Where will you go after The Islands of Divine Music, what are you working on now?

I have a manuscript called The Magic Beans that I think is just about ready to try for publication. It’s a kind of modern Jack and the Beanstalk and Don Quixote quest story that takes place in California in the fall of 2003. It depicts another Italian-American family involved with gambling, war crimes, neo-Nazi skinheads, fairy tales and a near death experience. I have several other manuscripts, some of them in the mystery genre, that are in varying stages of completion or revision.

Would you share some about your writing process?  Where do you write?  What inspires you there?  Do you have genealogical charts, maps, photos, other prompts?

I write every morning before I go to work as well as one night per week and much longer periods on vacation breaks. My space is a tall walk-in closet with an old computer, desk, lots of books and notes and clutter, some pictures of loved-ones, some maps on a wall. I journal in public coffee shops and sometimes write fiction there, but mostly I find it productive to write in my closet, away from all distractions.

If you could describe yourself without referring to your work as a writer, how would you do it?

I try to pay attention to what comes my way, with my loved-ones, the kids I teach, the things I read and see and hear. I’ve had some reminders of the brevity of life, and I want to keep my mind open to what delights it has in store for me.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about yourself or your work?

Greg Michalson at Unbridled Books is a dream editor, and I’m very lucky that he saw what I was trying to do with The Islands of Divine Music.

Thank you, John, for sharing this insight into yourself and your writing.  I’ll look forward to reading The Magic Beans and wish you the best of success with your other writing projects.

Come back tomorrow, we’ll have the first Spotlight on Bookstores of the new year, written by John.  Click here to order The Islands of Divine Music from Amazon.com.

TEASER TUESDAYS is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading and asks you to:

My tease for today:

He knows why he is thinking of Denise with this keenness.  Her birthday card to him did not arrive last week, as it has, always on time, for the last twenty years.

This is from Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, a collection of linked stories that center around Olive, a retired schoolteacher in rural Maine.  In this excerpt, her husband, Henry, is thinking about a former employee at his pharmacy.

I’m really enjoying the “novel in stories” or “linked stories” concept.  I recently read The Islands of Divine Music (John Addiego) which had a similar structure.  In yesterday’s mail I got a wonderful surprise from Christopher Meeks, author of the short fiction collection, Months and Seasons.  Chris sent me an ARC of his latest work, The Brightest Moon of the Century … thank you!  I thought this was collection of linked stories, but it says “A Novel” on the cover (as did The Islands of Divine Music).  I’m looking forward to seeing what I find between the covers!

Have you read any linked short stories?  What are you reading this week?

The Islands of Divine Music

Back of the book blurb:  Against a backdrop of Immigration, Prohibition, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and the new millennium, the Verbicaro family make their way from Southern Italy to San Francisco to the Yucatan, finding ways to reinvent themselves as each of them brushes up against some aspect of the divine, or the profane. 

The family matriarch, Rosari, is a little girl whose family flees Italy because her prodigality is exploited by illiterate kidnappers.  When she and her father reach San Francisco, she meets the man she’ll marry, a handsome, fiercely strong peasant named Giuseppe Verbicaro.  Rosari and Giuseppe’s oldest son, Narciso, a handsome and dim-witted dandy, barely evades disaster by his simple-minded innocence and luck.  His passionate brother Ludovico, a talented third-baseman in the old San Francisco minor leagues, falls prey to the illicit dreams of a wise guy from the Gambino family.  Their youngest brother, Joe, a brilliant child and shrewd businessman, is ashamed of his ethnicity and, in particular, his father, in part because Giuseppe, wandering North Beach, believes that God directs him to marry a teenage, pregnant Mexican prostitute named Maria. 

Further senility, faith, or vermouth convinces the old man that Maria s child, Jesus, is the product of an immaculate conception.  The event is both a family disgrace and a bizarre blessing.  The child’s life and death have a profound effect on Giuseppe’s progeny, particularly Joe’s children: Penelope, who flees the country following involvement in deadly anti-Vietnam War activities, and her brothers Paulie and Angelo, who are inspired by the young Jesus to embark upon a quest of several thousand miles to heal old wounds and recover the family’s lost, but most-prized spiritual treasures.

She is Too Fond of Books’ Review:  John Addiego’s debut novel is powerful not only for what he writes, but also for the structure of the novel itself, which spans five generations over about a century.  The first chapter is ”A Rose in the New World” in which Lazaro, Eleonora, and their daughter Rosari are forced to flee Italy for America after young Rosari unwittingly assists in a kidnapping attempt by translating a ransom note for the kidnappers.  In this and each subsequent chapter, the plot revolves around a turning point in the life of one member of the family; here we have Rosari, who will bear six children and live nearly one hundred years as the matriarch of her family.

After I read about three chapters in The Islands of Divine Music, and this “one chapter, one central character, one conflict” pattern became evident, my mind switched into the mode of reading linked stories.  I had read another review that indicated the book read this way, so I was expecting it; it would have been an easy rhythm to get into in any case.  Addiego indicates in the acknowledgements that some of the stories were previously published in literary journals; I do wonder if it would be more effective to market the book as a “novel in stories.”

Addiego sets the family stories within the larger stories of the day, yet the history of America and the world are for the most part simply the background within which the Verbicaro family fight their demons and are helped by angels.  Shortly after Rosari is married, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 hits, and her husband turns from work shining the shoes of the wealthy to work carting away the rubble of the fallen symbols of this wealth:

… Giuseppe made money by way of destruction.  He attacked houses and toppled them like trees to make room for new construction.  He chopped down buildings with a hammer, destroyed banks and offices.  He removed the citadels of the rich from the face of the earth, returned the broken towers, wrought of brick and wood, to dust.

And as he worked the had six children, and America went to war with Italy, and wine was illegal to buy.  Giuseppe became the father of Narciso, Francesca, Ludovico, Grazia, Mary, and Joe, and he destroyed buildings by day and made wine in his backyard with a cast-iron press by night …

Some of you may know of my admiration of the cover art on books published by Unbridled Books, an independent press.  If you can’t see it in the above image, click to enlarge the cover of Islands of Divine Music.  It shows several people hanging on to dandelion seeds, their directions changed by the intervention of a breath; it’s a beautiful metaphor for the course of our lives.

I connected with this book because it reminded me of the stories I have collected about my own family – bits of lore, passed down through the generations, some with gaps, some with such great detail that you feel as if you were watching the story as it played out.  These stories taken individually are pleasant to read and could each stand alone; taken together in this format, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.  In the end, The Islands of Divine Music is more than just the story of the Verbicaro family, it also becomes a story of redemption.  I’ll look forward to reading more of Addiego’s beautiful writing.

Many thanks to Caitlin at Unbridled Books for providing my review copy.  Click here to order The Islands of Divine Music from Amazon.com.

Are there any “novels in stories” or “linked stories” that you’d recommend?

TEASER TUESDAYS

He and Rosario walked the island of Manhattan and described her to the foodmongers and flower girls on the corners.  They cried and wore the soles of their shoes to paper on the streets and asked each other why God would do this sort of thing to them, to Eleanora, to people who had done nothing to deserve misfortune.

This is from John Addiego’s The Islands of Divine Music.  In my interview with Joyce Hinnefeld (author of In Hovering Flight), Joyce tells us that this is one of the books she has recently read.

What are you reading now … care to share a few sentences?