Invernale by Dario Voltolini

Italian fiction

Original title – Invernale

Translator -Brian Shannon

Source – Review copy

I keep saying what a bright time it is for books in Translation in the UK at the moment. I’ve been around for nearly two decades, and we haven’t had as many choices or as many great small new presses as we do now. So getting sent this, the second book from New Cross Press, was a real privilege, as I am just a small book blogger, all said and done.  Anyway, Dario Voltolini has been a blogger with the lit Blog Nazione Indiana, then a spin-off magazine; he has written many books, and this is his first to be translated into English. He also plays football for the Italian writers’’ football team (let’s hope they’re better than the current national team  ).In fact, football crops up in a couple of places in the book

Crack the lamb’s head, it seems to be staring at you through unseeing pupils; strike it dead centre; bones, tongue emerge.

With a few short blows, cleave it along the usual groove. The anatomy of the head comes into view, the nasal passages, the brain’s casing, the vertebra’s connection to the skull. Hastily reach for bunches of rosemary and bay – some sage, if there is any – savour the aroma of the food in the customer’s home, whet your appetite and guess how they might cook it. Imagine, for an instant, their house, conjure up this evening’s dinner guests; then snap back to the present moment, hand over the change, ask whoever’s next, “What’ll it be?” Catch the order amidst the clamour: a leg, a shoulder. Grab the leg and carve it in the sliver of time the block is free, not a second to waste; hack down hard between the beast’s shoulder blades, into the muscle until the bone it encloses breaks.

the viseral buthcery at the start of the book

This book focuses on a real event in the writer’s life: the death of his father. A butcher, and the turning point in this book comes when his father, Gino, a master of the skill of Butchery, who works in the Turin meat market, unfortunately, one day, while cleaving a piece of meat and just as he is going down with his knife, someone is going by, and this makes his hand move a little to the left and his thumb is gone.  He has the thumb reconnect, but this is th start of what the title of the book refers to: the long winter. Gino’s death returns to work, but the thumb isn’t healing, as the blade was covered with lots of blood and other things around the wound.  So when Gino isn’t getting well, in fact, worse, we see the downfall and struggle of a man first lost in his life and trade, but then in his own life.  Alongside this is, at times, a visceral work from the scenes iof chopping meat to the cigarettes Gino smokes. Even things like the snippets of matches one mentions Rossi, as in Paolo Rossi, which sets the book in the late 70s, as the match against Argentina seems to be a famous encounter from that year. We see Gino facing life as he is told the worst.

What’s still astonishing is a word he says as Antognoni is about to play the ball to Bettega. He says: “Goal.” Then there’s the pass to Bettega – whose family lived in the same building where he lived with his – Bettega flicks it on to Rossi and darts forward; Rossi with one touch closes off the triangle and plays it back to Bettega (the Argentine defence split wide open) who, with one strike, sends it towards the far post, and, sure enough — goal.

The match I think it is one from 1979 am I right

I loved this. Voltolini is compared to Raymond Carver i can see that this book has choppy chapters the propel the prose forward it mixes a lot of viseral images from the meart to smoking a cigarette to the matches on the tv alongside Gino’s jounrnety his Long winter. I was also reminded of his fellow Turin writer Alessandro Baricco in the way they both use very precise ways of describing things. The book is a glimpse of a father in pieces: those moments of his father, the meat market , the cigarettes and the football. A visceral image: the smell, the feel of the meats being prepared. How to prepare the meat. A look at a silent man from a son now putting him together. I liked the connection to football; it is a universal language that, with Rossi, lives on in Italy and connects both father and son. It is a book about a father and a son a quiet book, a subtle look at a life in those glimpses that, years later, are like crumbs left on a plate or the trail of blood in the case left from a piece of meat prepared, that flicker of the TV of a match in the past you vaguely remember; I was reminded of the European Cup final for Liverpool many years ago when I was about ten.  This is a great novella. A book that lingers long after the last page! Do you have a book that reminds you of memories