cantaraville & cantarabooks

What attracted me about Cantaraville&CantaraBooks was the clear interest in the way an Author deals with the English language. Today’s publishers see English as a mean to have a story come across the public, not as a mean in itself, one which concurs to the beauty of a novel. If a novel is well written is all for the better, if not, it won’t matter. I can remember a time when literature was mainly seen as a way of writing, then came the story. Many storytellers were so good in their writing that the story you were reading was always too short because their lines were indeed a treat. I’m referring to Nabokov, Oscar Wilde, Malcolm Lowry, Lawrence Durrell , Papà H. and many many others. Today’s prose has become so colloquial – at a very casual level of colloquy - that a book is left barely with its content. If the content is not there, then the reader has been duped, left with nothing.
As about me. I was born in Italy and I always was fond of languageS. English has always been one of my favorite, for the vastness of its terminology which smacks of the many races that have influenced the language , for its marvelous elasticity that offers the opportunity to say the same line in so many different ways. Bernard Shaw said that in English fish could be written in 5 different ways and always pronounced fish and meant 5 different things. I didn’t check, but Bernard Shaw knew much more than I do and I’m confident he was right as English has indeed been the beloved turf of so many great novelists. Having said all that…. where am I? Yes...At 72, I wanted to see what life had left me with of the many things I had seen and ended up writing a 230,000 book. When I began rereading, I discovered it was written in different languages, Italian, English, some pieces were written in Spanish. As I reflected upon the phenomenon I understood that it was consequential to the place I was describing, when writing about Ravic (my main character) I wrote in English as he was a surgeon practicing in Los Angeles, when I was writing about Duna (another ch.) it was in French as he was a busker living in Paris, when I was describing Sioux’s (my heroine) it was all in Spanish as she was an acclaimed rejoneadora (torera in horseback). I found the reading very real and probably a novel would be more sanguine if written this way, but of course we do not know so many languages and I’d find myself in the shit if a writer would suddenly begin writing in Turkish just because his character arrives in Istanbul. I finally decided that The Europeano would be wearing the English language. Alas.
Ok, ok, all this rigmarole is to tell you that I’m very pleased to present my book at CantaraBooks and be judged for the way I treat the English language, besides the story.
Here, in this post that I am allowed to open, I present its SYNOPSIS
The eUROPEANO -
Reflections From A Falling Knife
by Luigi Belmonte
What you get from these pages is a long moment of oblivion that will help you to get away from it all.
Synopsis : In brief this is the story of a surgeon, Ravic Luna, an orphan from Hungary, who goes to America in search of work. He soon becomes the head surgeon of a Mexican Institute, La Santa Maria de Las Sierras down at La Marina Del Rey . Beloved by his patients, mostly woebegone illegal aliens, Ravic is also contended by the stars and starlets of the Hollywood glitz. Parties and daring operations go hand in hand in this first part of the novel. He gets married to one of Beverly Hills’s wealthiest socialite. A car accident puts an end to his marriages. Both the marriage and the funeral are opportunities to describe the Hollywood universe impinging on Ravic’s life, it is gossip on the prowl so to speak.
One evening while attending a young chicano by the banks of the Rio Grande, Ravic gets involved in a shootout and loses the use of his right hand. An event long overdue, as losing his hand was a demon which had never left Ravic, ever since a fortune teller told him - he was still in Paris - such an incident will occur. It is the end of his career, he becomes an addict and we see him drifting in Los Angeles underground. But at the bottom of the pit, life rewards him with an unexpected fluke, the meeting with Sioux. It is a love at first sight, but doomed from its very onset. Theirs was the final rehearsal for a scenario which had already been devised somewhere else and they just happened to be the chosen actors. Their uncanny enigma would not change from the first days .
But The Europeano is in fact three stories running parallel to each other. Ravic’s, Sioux’s and Duna’s. The three tales mingle in a constant change of scenery. In the beginning you have Ravic’s story unraveling in the different operating theaters where there are no rules, as one dies where one should live and one lives where one should die. Sioux’s story unfolds next to Ravic’s in Part One o the novel. As a Rodeo beauty queen she keeps moving along the border of the Rio Grande, until she becomes an acclaimed rejoneadora (torero on horseback) Her most colorful life goes on until one day Prairie, her beloved mare, dies impaled by a bull. She too, like Ravic, is faced with a sudden twist in her life. And finally Duna. He makes his appearance at the beginning of Part Two. He’s a violinist but makes his living as a busker. He becomes the king of Beaubourg, the vibrant quarter of Paris’ Le Marais. His job consists of placing his violin on its slant as he’s endowed with the rare gift of sensing objects’ secret points of equilibrium, a gift which he shares with his twin brother Ravic… The novel is also the story of two brothers who had never met, know of each other, but do not have many ways to find each other out. Destiny will have them meet in the maze of a convoluted intrigue. It will be in New York where the three stories become one at last. This leaves the reader with the impression that of all the many settings where the action coalesces, New York gets the upper hand. The three stories are all equally flamboyant, it’s the least I can say, although this is not a novel with a happy ending. Like all large stories should , The Europeano too has the potential to be made into an infinite motion picture.
Two Words Before You Begin The 230,000 w. Climb
When I began this story many things were different in the world. I was younger for one, writers still got paid to the tune of millions, downloading music or books was still a tentative process, www.eMule.com didn’t exist, in short a novelist still had the right to believe that he could make a living out of his dreams, as novelists are primarily dreamers. In retrospect it was naive on my part to begin my career by writing this long saga whose length would cut me out of today’s publishing market. But it didn’t seem so dramatically long. It became long as many events occurred while writing The Europeano, and in order to keep up with history, I often had to readjust my story. With the fall of the Berlin wall, Duna, Ravic’s twin brother, was at last free to leave Hungary in search of his brother whom he had never met. It was clear that I could not write about Ravic without telling of Duna, the nomadic juggler who from the banks of the Danube would become first violin at the Carnegie Hall. And Sioux? As I was writing about her colorful tale of a horseback torero, the Twin Towers turned into 9/11 serving me with a new, not any less tragic denouement for my beauty queen of the rejoneo. As for Ravic, soi-disant the main character, how would I ever have imagined that he’d lose his hand and consequently put a break to his career and turn into a drifter? Ravic’s hand – for a time I wanted it to be the title of the novel - suddenly intruded so distinctly as to become itself a new character in my narration. Ravic, is it you the bearer of your hand, or is it your hand the bearer of your face? (q) An intrusion not any different from that of Joanna Mellon whose face was disturbed by a camuse sort of a nose, a freakish ill conceived clitoris that would become Ravic’s reason of great concern. Joanna who on second meeting appears as a ravishing beauty. ‘I’ve done a nose job,’ she confesses. Joanna who would become Ravic’s wife. The whole novel is indeed rife with metaphysical inputs. At this point let me tell you two words about myself, the puppeteer behind his clowns. Ever since I was born 72 years ago on the island of Sicily my two guardian angels have been Don Quixote and Charlie Chaplin, they instilled in me a sense of ridicule which turned my life into an interrupted long smile which ultimately helped me to transpose my friends of yesterday into the clowns of my pages and in this new vest they are no longer recognizable and what’s left is the…. ridicule. Because of its scaffolding I would classify The Europeano as Non Fiction whereas the love story moving through its folds is fictional. Given the distinct depiction of its characters, the temptation to find out who is behind this or that personage is always there, almost a quizzical game, but it’ll get you nowhere as I made it impossible, for this is not a book on gossip: the difference between gossip and humor is abysmal. All in all, see it as a walk into a landscape in which we all lived in total unawareness , besieged in fact by heinous forces not long before these would be identified.
The title too underwent its own changes. It was first The Europeano, when it was to be only Ravic’s story- Once his Mexican colleagues found out he was European all began to call him L'eUROPEANO (q). The title was soon joined by a subtitle. In reality Reflections From A Falling Knife are nothing but Ravic’s considerations over his own life. The Falling Knife is indeed his bistoury.