Wait Until Spring, Bandini

Rating:
Summary: A beautifully written Italian-American family story
Review: "Wait Until Spring, Bandini," by John Fante, is a novel about an Italian-American family living in Colorado. The story focuses on Arturo Bandini, a teenager who is the eldest of the family's three sons. His father, Svevo, is a bricklayer and an immigrant to the United States. Very Americanized, Arturo loves baseball and is tormented inside over his family's poverty.

Fante richly develops the relationships among the members of this often dysfunctional family. He also vividly evokes the experience of raising a family in poverty. Particularly interesting is Fante's portrayal of Roman Catholicism within the life of the Bandini family; religion is shown to be a very ambiguous force. There are some dark, even cruel episodes as the family's story unfolds.

As much as I enjoyed "Wait," I did not find it in the end to be as satisfying as the other Fante novels which I have read ("1933 Was a Bad Year" and "Full of Life"). Still, it's a powerful family story that is graced by Fante's excellent prose style.

Rating:
Summary: A book about sad memories
Review: 'Wait Until Spring, Bandini' is a kind of book that deserves a place among others that have a main target in vision: to tell a story of memories of a hard and impoverished youth with some touches of bittersweat evocations, like the first love for a special girl, recollections of Christmas time and little family pleasures. Arturo Bandini is a teenager in the years of Depression, of Italian lineage, making his first contacts with the world around him, in a continuous progression to maturity. In this angle, the book has some points of contact with J.D. Salinger 'The Catcher's in the Rye' although Fante has a more strong style of writing - strong, not better - that made him almost a 'beatnik' author like Bukowski. Fante know his office and the book has some excellent moments: the description of the relationship between Svevo Bandini (Arturo's father) and Miss Hildegarde, mainly when this relationship is caught by the eyes of young Arturo; Arturo's delusions toward his first and platonic love, Rosa Pinelli and some other moments, captured with intensity and poignant touches. But the book is far from a masterpiece and sometimes develops a restrained and peasant pace,sometimes even redundant and unimpressive. Anyway, this one is a good first point to know John Fante and his work, almost all of them centered in the figure of Arturo Bandini, again the main characther of 'Ask the Dust' and 'Dream on Bunker Hill'.

Rating:
Summary: Fante-stic!!!
Review: A poignant book, wonderfully written. In my opinion, this was his first and best novel. Even better than "Ask the dust", regarded as his masterpiece... A brilliant beginning for such a writer!