Wait Until Spring, Bandini

I was really surprised by how much I liked this book. The prose was unassuming but able to communicate the inner and outer lives of each character with seamless transition. Fante had such a natural command of voice and character that the novel's structure just sort of fell into place. He may dazzle with high modernist pretensions of language play and aureate description but those literary foundations are all here in humble, utilitarian expression. You could actually draw a line from Henry James to this novel if you wanted to be all highfalutin about it.

I highly recommend this book. It is a quick and unassuming read but the narrative machinations are sophisticated lessons in how to erase oneself as an author.

I was really surprised by how much I liked this book. The prose was unassuming but able to communicate the inner and outer lives of each character with seamless transition. Fante had such a natural command of voice and character that the novel's structure just sort of fell into place. He may dazzle with high modernist pretensions of language play and aureate description but those literary foundations are all here in humble, utilitarian expression. You could actually draw a line from Henry James to this novel if you wanted to be all highfalutin about it.

I highly recommend this book. It is a quick and unassuming read but the narrative machinations are sophisticated lessons in how to erase oneself as an author.

Lo primero a destacar de este libro, es su seriedad, apenas te ríes, no como pasaba con 'Llenos de vida' o 'La hermandad de la uva'. Nuestros protagonistas son la familia Bandini, y sobre todo Arturo Bandini, alter ego del propio Fante. ¿Os ha pasado alguna vez que lo que estabais leyendo parecía sacado de vuestra vida? Pues esto mismo me ha pasado a mí. Muchas situaciones por las que pasan los protagonistas las he pasado yo también, lo que me ha hecho pensar en el doloroso pasado.

A destacar lo bien escrito que está el libro. Te cuenta las cosas de manera sencilla y al mismo tiempo disfrutas con su prosa. En fin, muy recomendable, como todos los libros de este autor, por lo que parece.

What a sweet book. Really feels like the mind of a fourteen year old with his exaggeration and constant mood changes. Really well written and I would argue that it is better than Ask the Dust (although I like the style in that book more). I really like how the perspective slowly switched from Svevo to Arturo to Maria. You feel for them all. I like how the title coincides with the last segment. Really solid start to the series.

Like I have seen in a lot of other comments about this book, I discovered Fante via Bukowski. This, to date, is the only book I have read by him but I found it brilliant. Very absorbing and beautiful. I really ought to finish the quartet when I can as I have heard things really get going in The Road to Los Angeles and Ask the Dust.

Choppy opening, before Fante hits his pissed off, nihilistic stride. Heartwarming and funny, the sort of stories where you feel bad for someone and want to wring their neck at the same time.

The plot of this book is pretty much nonexistent, the characters never deviate from their stereotypes, and to top it off the dialogues gave me the impression that the whole thing played out like one of these crummy family 90s movies (where the realism?). Fante's dictionary is stunning, and as a non-native speaker, his work undoubtedly enriched mine, yet at some point I got genuinely fed up with his unusual and clunky style. The author could have benefited from a straightforward prose, but instead he stuck with his dull stream of consciousnesses revolving around a super hormonal dirt poor and dense kid's wishes to bang his classmate and his weird obsession for baseball players, not to mention his uncommon choice of fancy words. Bukowski show more had a thing for Fante, but this novel is and will always be nothing like Ham on Rye. I will look into his other works in the hope that Arturo Bandini will turn out to be less of a daydreaming imbecile as well, because that's one of the main things that turned my stomach throughout the novel. show less