Some books feel as though readers must swallow them whole, absorbing the story as part of their being. Other books force readers to hold them apart, to stand back from them as at a gallery, facing a confounding but insistent work of art. Inverno, a work of fiction from poet Cynthia Zarin (Orbit; An Enlarged Heart), is the second kind. It is a cord pulled taut and fraying, an ambitious piece of prose that tangles the past and the present, layering allusions to movies, novels, song lyrics, and fairy tales.
Inverno opens with Caroline, standing in Central Park as snow falls around her, waiting for Alastair to call. In fact, the entirety of this slim novel's fractured narrative spins around this moment, as 30 years of connection and love and brokenness and pain are concentrated in this one unresolved moment. Ostensibly about Caroline and Alastair's decades-long love, Inverno glances off the occasional facts of their relationship before taking readers down otherwise unmarked paths.
Readers might puzzle over some choices, but Zarin's use of a stream-of-consciousness style will please fans of Virginia Woolf: "Once in Montalcino the fireflies were on one side of the road, but not the other (was it the grapes they liked, or olives, she couldn't remember) and then, there they were again, twenty years later, last summer, like spawn lighting the pasture, as she looked out the window past the lilacs." With the poet's eye for detail, Inverno is a brief but powerful novel, and readers will appreciate the emotional breadth on display in this kaleidoscopic story. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian