Re: RARA-AVIS: Bardin and John Fante

From: BaxDeal@aol.com
Date: 27 Nov 2002


In a message dated 11/27/02 4:28:18 AM, Robison_M@crane.navy.mil writes:

<< I was thumbing through the special Pulp edition of Crime Time

last night and found another one, John Fante. Does anybody

have any recommendations for him? The article I looked at

mentioned 1933 WAS A BAD YEAR and another one I can't remember.

Abebooks has WAIT UNTIL SPRING BANDINI, FULL OF LIFE, BROTHER-

HOOD OF THE GRAPE, ASK THE DUST, and WEST OF SPRING (2 novellas),

and a book of stories called WINE OF YOUTH. >>

I've read ASK THE DUST and WAIT UNTIL SPRING BANDINI, as well as FULL OF LIFE, Fante's biography written by Stephen Cooper. Fante has been recently rediscovered by the local literary intelligencia and touted as an unheralded genius. Ask the Dust and Wait Until Spring Bandini are fictionalized accounts of Fante's boyhood and early life in Los Angeles. Bandini is a young writer who is utterly convinced of his own literary prowess, and wants to convince you too. He is not a very pleasant character to spend much time with, the sort of obnoxious guy who, if you met at a cocktail party, you'd want to lock in the garage.

My personal take is that Fante is much ado about nothing. His prose style is florid and his stories don't seem to go anywhere. The only thing hardboiled about him is the lousy way he treats women. I only managed to wade through both DUST and BANDINI, Fante's most famous works because Stephen Cooper lives across the street from me and regards the author in such high esteem.

But make up your own mind. People whose business is to know and teach literature think the guy's the Cat's Pajamas. I'm just a guy who writes for a living.

John Lau

--
# To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
# majordomo@icomm.ca.  This will not work for the digest version.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 27 Nov 2002 EST