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The Cousin
by John Calabro
Toronto: Quattro
Books, October/2009, ISBN 9780981018638, 145 pp., $16.95 paper.
John Calabro's first novel, Bellecour, published in 2005, drew critical acclaim and was considered by The Globe and 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 latest work, the novella The Cousin, was published by the relatively new small press Quattro Books, of which Calabro is a founding member. Quattro Books is devoted exclusively to publishing novellas and, to the best of my knowledge, it is the only small press to do so.
The novella is a form not favoured by contemporary Canadian writers, although in Europe and the US many works of what 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 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 language are all focused on contributing to a single issue. In this sense, as the British novelist Ian McEwan remarked, the novella has much in common with poetry in method and the effect it strives to achieve. We do not stop and start with a novella as we do with a novel. It is rather a fast one-two knockout read, usually in one sitting, that leaves us breathless or stunned.
The Cousin is essentially a tale of unmasking the truth. This theme is underlined by the narrator Sal's frequent references to Pirandello, the Sicilian playwright famous for his plays about masks within masks that people wear. Each of the major characters, whether it is the repressed Sal, or his nocturnally sexually adventurous cousin Charlie, or Sal's dour, domineering Uncle Calogero, conspires 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 to visit Sal's long-lost relatives. The sex will have to wait. This opening scene is important, although at first it feels like a throwaway moment meant to draw the reader into the story. Here Calabro establishes Sal's unambiguous heterosexual orientation. Later he will have Sal unravel in a drunken and stoned frenzy when he visits a gay nightclub with his cousin Charlie, the meek, bullied 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.
During Sal and Susan's visit, Uncle Calogero, true to form, is subtly condescending, sharp-tongued, and easily angered, though he masks his feelings and attitudes in front of Susan. Sal remembers that when he was a child his uncle was a brute and a bully, and during a family lunch in the local Petra restaurant he demonstrates what a quick-tempered, somewhat vulgar ogre he can be even as an old man. It is soon revealed that Uncle Calogero is responsible for ruining both Sal's parents' lives and in turn his own life.
Sal is emotionally damaged and secretive about his childhood, traits he is said to have inherited from his taciturn parents. Susan sees the visit to Sicily from Canada as an opportunity to learn more about her withdrawn, conservative banker husband and his past.
As the story progresses, Sal learns that perhaps he had a larger role to play in his parents' 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 exist in the lives of Sal, Uncle Calogero, and Charlie, and complicating matters for Sal is the reemergence of his lost Sicilian heritage (his acceptance of his grandfather's knife as a gift, for 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 labyrinthine village streets echo the theme of secrets and masked sexual transgressions.
The narrative moves toward what can be described as a shocking Burroughs-like induced hallucination at the end of the novella. Here Sal, significantly, tries to use his grandfather's knife, 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 is at a fever pitch but Calabro concludes by moving Sal away from the nightmare he is trapped in to an exercise in bonding between the two cousins. This allows for a pleasant ending that brings sane order to what was drunken sexual disorder, but it seems too clean and neat, given all that went before.
Nevertheless, The Cousin's use of sexuality allows for an original look at finding the truth about 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.
Carmelo Militano's latest collection of poetry is Feast Days (Olive Press, 2009).
Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.