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Dec 15 - Dec 22,2002 |
Little Casino big payout
American author Gilbert Sorrentino on his latest book
By Nancy MacLeod
Originally Published: 2002-11-24
Little Casino is a novel that invites rereading. A collection of fragmented memories about growing up in Brooklyn, it teases you as it unveils truths of life, contradicts itself and plays little tricks on your mind. It is in fact a very playful book, something which the author intended it to be. "I hope that you could read the book once or twice, then a year or so later, it might be fun to pick it up and begin anywhere," says Gilbert Sorrentino, in Toronto recently with the International Festival of Authors. "You know more or less what's going on. It's not like you have to follow a story."
Sorrentino is the acclaimed Italian-American author and poet, most famous for his novel Mulligan Stew. In his career he has taught at Stanford University, received two Guggenheim Fellowships and a Lannan Literary Award. He recently moved back to his native Brooklyn after several years in California, which is properly skewered in Little Casino (at one point he calls San Francisco "The Queens of California" perhaps best summing up his take of the place).
Made up of loosely related snapshots, Little Casino roughly follows a chronological order from the 1930s through World War II and on to the present day, with the various characters slowly maturing on the way. "The book, without being engineered that way, does curiously move from childhood to adulthood," says Sorrentino. "It is in a way about how to grow up."
On the way to growing up we meet a slew of Brooklynites, most of whom remain unnamed; men, women and children who vividly inhabit the pages in often painful, or painfully funny, ways. The specific identities of the characters are less important than their experiences and feelings. Rather than trying to map out who's who, which you soon realize is not worth the effort, it's better to just enjoy the ride. Once you do, it's a delight to get lost in world of people fumbling through adolescence, relationships and careers, which are as tangled as the streets of Brooklyn.
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