Overview
It is Christmas Eve. Sitting on the steps of the village church in front of an enormous bonfire lit in celebration of the season, a father and his son exchange stories. The father speaks of life as an emigrant from Italy, in perpetual limbo between departure and return, between France and his home. The son tells of a life marred by his father's long absences but also of an otherwise idyllic childhood spent in a vivid, enchanting land. Each hides an awful secret concerning the fate of a mysterious man whose affair with the boy's older sister changed their lives. On this night of nights, as the long-buried details seep through each man's story, a shared truth will finally emerge.Set in an Arbereshe town in southern Italy and told in alternating first-person voices, The Homecoming is simultaneously a coming-of-age novel, a love story, and a heartfelt cry against the atrocious standards of living that force so many southern Italians to seek a better life elsewhere. Here is an intense and moving novel about the difficulties of saying goodbye by one of Italy's greatest storytellers.
Synopsis
It is Christmas Eve. Sitting on the steps of the village church in front of an enormous bonfire lit in celebration of the season, a father and his son exchange stories. The father speaks of life as an emigrant from Italy, in perpetual limbo between departure and return, between France and his home. The son tells of a life marred by his father's long absences but also of an otherwise idyllic childhood spent in a vivid, enchanting land. Each hides an awful secret concerning the fate of a mysterious man whose affair with the boy's older sister changed their lives. On this night of nights, as the long-buried details seep through each man's story, a shared truth will finally emerge.
Set in an Arbereshe town in southern Italy and told in alternating first-person voices, The Homecoming is simultaneously a coming-of-age novel, a love story, and a heartfelt cry against the atrocious standards of living that force so many southern Italians to seek a better life elsewhere. Here is an intense and moving novel about the difficulties of saying goodbye by one of Italy's greatest storytellers.
Publishers Weekly
Abate's atmospheric tale (after Between Two Seas) concerns a Calabrian farming family whose father's migration to France in search of work causes a perilous vacuum at home. Eldest daughter Elisa, the product of a first marriage to a French woman, studies at the University of Cosenza, and has taken up with an older, married lover, spied on by Marco, the adolescent son (and part-time narrator), who runs wild and unsupervised over the Calabrian ravines with his fearless dog, Spertina. Like many of his compatriots, the father feels constantly torn between staying and leaving, and though he yearns to work on the farm and see his children grow up, he imagines "a pistol aimed at his forehead and the arrogant voice of the born whoremonger threatening him: ‘Leave, or I'll pull the trigger!'" Peppered liberally with phrases from the Arbëresh, an ancient dialect of the Albanian language, Abate's novel forms a lovely, sentimental hymn to this vanishing old world, with a focus much more on beautiful descriptive passages than on the largely incidental plot.(Aug.)
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Abate's atmospheric tale (after Between Two Seas) concerns a Calabrian farming family whose father's migration to France in search of work causes a perilous vacuum at home. Eldest daughter Elisa, the product of a first marriage to a French woman, studies at the University of Cosenza, and has taken up with an older, married lover, spied on by Marco, the adolescent son (and part-time narrator), who runs wild and unsupervised over the Calabrian ravines with his fearless dog, Spertina. Like many of his compatriots, the father feels constantly torn between staying and leaving, and though he yearns to work on the farm and see his children grow up, he imagines "a pistol aimed at his forehead and the arrogant voice of the born whoremonger threatening him: ‘Leave, or I'll pull the trigger!'" Peppered liberally with phrases from the Arbëresh, an ancient dialect of the Albanian language, Abate's novel forms a lovely, sentimental hymn to this vanishing old world, with a focus much more on beautiful descriptive passages than on the largely incidental plot.(Aug.)Library Journal
In a contemporary Calabrian village, a Christmas Eve bonfire brings a father and son closer together as they share their experiences and memories. In alternating chapters, the unnamed father talks about his first love and having to leave his adored hometown to work in northern France as a laborer. His son, Marco, relates how much he missed his father during these long absences; his love for Spertina, his devoted dog; and the secret he faithfully kept for his older sister, Elisa. Her relationship with a wayfarer brings about the climax of this well-told story of the importance of family bonds. The result is a graceful, poignant story full of humanity and compassion without sentimentality.Verdict This new novel by the multiple-award-winning Abate (Between Two Seas) is a coming-of-age tale, a love story, and an exploration of the economic hardships of southern Italy, which force many of its citizens to immigrate to other countries for employment.—Lisa Rohrbaugh, National Coll., Youngstown, OHKirkus Reviews
An adventurous and troubled boyhood is piquantly detailed in this 2004 novel from a respected Italian author (Between Two Seas, 2008).
It begins one Christmas Eve in the Calabrian town of Hora ("where we speak...an old-fashioned form of Albanian"), as a conversation between Tullio, home for the holidays from France (where he works), and his adolescent son Marco, the novel's primary narrator. This initiates a fragmented narrative that moves backward and forward in time, observing Marco's delighted immersion in the pleasures of an embracing family and environment, while counterpointing these against Tullio's memories of the lover (Morena) who bore his eldest daughter (Elisa), but died before they could marry. This sorrow is reborn during Tullio's subsequent married life when Elisa matures, goes away to college and dallies with a married man, who keeps reappearing in Marco's experience, sometimes as a friend and mentor, eventually emerging as the danger the suspicious Tullio always believed he would become. The novel is ever so slightly predictable and arguably underplotted. But its picture of life in a rural demi-paradise has real charm, as does Abate's complex characterization of Marco—all boy, all but irresistible, yet emphatically not idealized (e.g., while recovering from a serious illness, he spitefully alienates himself from everyone he loves). Elisa is, necessarily, less fully revealed, and Tullio's cryptic ingrained emotions are credibly linked to his mingled pride and guilt over "abandoning" his family in order to provide for them. The result is a compelling family chronicle in lucid miniature form.
Shugaar's lyrical translation adds further luster to another entry in what one hopes will be a continuing series of publications of Abate's impressive, immensely engaging fiction.