Book Review

Carmelo Militano

The Cousin
by John Calabaro
Toronto: Quattro Books, 2009
145 pp. $16.95

John Calabro’s first novel, Bellecour, published in 2005, drew critical acclaim and was considered by The Globe & Mail to be one of the top five first fictions of that year. The novel was also optioned to be made into a film. In 2006, Calabro released a collection of short stories called Somewhere Else. His new work is a novella called The Cousin published by Quattro Books of whom he is a founding member.

It is interesting to note hat Quattro Books is a relatively new small press on the literary scene devoted exclusively to publishing novellas. In fact, to the best of my knowledge the only small press interested in publishing only novellas.

The novella in Canada is not a form favored by contemporary Canadian writers although in Europe and the U.S. many works that are now considered masterpieces of literature are novellas. Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Orwell’s Animal Farm, Mann’s Death in Venice, and the exquisite classic Heart of Darkness by Conrad are all examples of how powerful and effective the novella can be as an art form.

So what is a novella? Is it merely a long short story or is it a short novel? How do its devices work? The answers allow us to see, in part, some of the challenges Calabro faced in writing The Cousin and how he met them.

A novella, generally speaking, has a concentrated purpose and design. Character, incident, theme, and often even language are all focused on contributing to a single issue. In this sense the novella, as the British novelist Ian McEWan remarked, has much in common with poetry in method and the powerful effect it strives to achieve. In other words, the novella aims to be concise, powerful, and moving. We do not stop and start with a novella as we do with a novel. It is rather a fast one two knock out read that leaves us breathless or stunned usually in one sitting.

The Cousin is essentially a tale of unmasking the truth. This theme is underlined by Sal’s frequent referencing to Pirandello, the Sicilian playwright famous for his plays about masks within masks that people wear. Each of the major characters whether it is Sal our repressed narrator, or his nocturnal sexually adventurous cousin Charlie, or Sal’s dour domineering Uncle Calogero, conspirer consciously or unconsciously to ‘mask’ the truth.

The story opens with Sal describing his pretty Celtic wife after she has emerged from the shower. He wantonly lies on their hotel bed suggesting he wants sex before they go out but alas duty calls; Susan reminds him they are in Sicily after all to visit Sal’s long lost relatives. The sex will have to wait. This opening little scene is important, although at first in feels like a throw away moment meant to draw the reader into the story. Here Calabro establishes Sal’s unambiguous heterosexual orientation. Latter he will have him unravel in a drunken and stoned frenzy when he visits a gay nightclub with what he thought was his meek bullied cousin Charlie, the son of his Uncle Calogero. The scenes near the end of the book sizzle with erotic power and climax (pardon the pun) in a desperate act of violence as Sal asserts himself to regain mastery over himself and his erotic feelings and perhaps his lost or masked Sicilian identity.

Sal and Susan end up going to visit Uncle Calogero and family in spite of Sal’s reluctance. True to form Sal’s uncle is subtly condescending, sharp-tongued and easily angered but he masks his feelings and attitudes in front of Susan.

Sal remembers when he was a child his Uncle was a brute and a bully and indeed during a family lunch in the local Petra restaurant he shows us what a quick-tempered somewhat vulgar ogre he can be even as an old man.

Sal soon reveals it is his Uncle Calogero who is responsible for ruining both his mother and father’s lives and in turn his own life.

Sal is emotionally repressed or damaged and secretive about his childhood, traits he is said to have in inherited from his taciturn parents. Susan, on the other hand, is anxious to learn all there is to learn about Sal’s past and sees the visit to Sicily from Canada as an opportunity to learn more about her withdrawn conservative banker husband.

As the story progresses Sal learns that perhaps he had a larger role to play in his parent’s sour marriage than his memory had allowed. As well, in a fine evocative moment, his mother ‘s spirit returns to suggest her own sexual transgression was not what it had appeared to be.

Secrets within secrets like Russian dolls exist in the lives of Sal, Uncle Calogero, and Charlie and complicating matters for Sal is the reemergence or resurfacing of his lost Sicilian heritage (his acceptance of his grandfather’s knife as a gift is an example.) and his confused memory of what really happened between his mother and his Uncle Calogero.

The Cousin’s pace is swift even when Calabro pauses to describe the ancient streets and buildings of Petra or to add a macabre anecdote from its past. The past and labyrinth village streets echoing the theme of secrets and masked sexual transgressions.

Thus, we move from a visit to an unpleasant Uncle one sunny afternoon into night and discovering Sal’s cousin’s secret life and on to what can only be described as a shocking Burroughs-like induced hallucination at the end of the novel. Here Sal, significantly, tries to use his grandfather’s knife, the one passed on to him by his bellicose Uncle, to reestablish his identity as a heterosexual man by murdering a beautiful black transvestite or does he?

The tension at this point in the novella is at fever pitch but Calabro decides to conclude by moving Sal away from the dark side or nightmare he is trapped in to an exercise in bonding between the two cousins. The ending allows for a pleasant ending that brings sane order to what was drunken sexual disorder but it seems too pat and neat of an ending. It is just too clean and neat given all what came before this concluding scene.
Nevertheless, The Cousin‘s use of sexuality is an original look at finding the truth about your roots and identity. The language is crisp and clear and the Sicilian setting is beautifully recreated in fresh realistic brushstrokes. The use of Italian and Sicilian dialect makes the story feel authentic. It all works to unmask the masks of family life in ancient Sicily.