The Little Sailor

by Anthony Valerio

Cultural Writing. Memoir. "THE LITTLE SAILOR is a literary gem from one of our foremost writers. Anthony Valerio's evocative prose woos the characters onto the page and into the hearts of its readers.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1884419941
• ISBN13: 9781884419942
• Release Date: June 2008
• Publisher: Bordighera Press
• Length: 81 Pages
• Weight: 0.29 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Gourmet Fiction

Is it a novel? a memoir? A book-length prose poem? Actually, Anthony Valerio's latest book is a little bit of all three and a whole lot more. You might know him as the author of two books of short essays, ("The Mediterranean Runs Through Brooklyn" and "Valentino and the Great Italians"), a novel ("Lefty and the Button Men"), two biographies (A. Bart Giamatti and Anita Garibaldi) and a memoir ("Toni Cade Bambara's One Sicilian Night"). His new book, "The Little Sailor," reveals skills he's honed to perfection through his previous work. It's not what happens in "Little Sailor" that matters--for much of it could have, and probably has happened to many of us: we've all had childhood desires, crushes and adult fantasies. What's unique about this work is how this master storyteller concocts and serves the prose that works literary magic. This is nothing short of what I can only describe as gourmet writing. That's how carefully this writer chooses his words. "The pleasure you'll extract from this writing comes from savoring lean sentences that hold the weight of paragraphs such as: In the late afternoon, amid gulls and marsh smells of sea salt and clams and crabs, the most beautiful woman the Little Sailor's father had ever seen walks along Shelter Island's Silver Beach." It all results in images that will remain with you like powerful photographs--an avocation Valerio took up not too long ago. "Little Sailor" is divided into two parts. The first, reads more like a traditional memoir, only Valerio presents his younger self as a character in the story of his past, and from this distance, anything can happen. Part One traces the evolution of the female presence in Antonio's life. The first section is entitled Brooklyn and focuses on the women of his past: friends of his mother, girl playmates, fawning aunts and strangers, and early lovers. The second section, "Italy," presents more recent life experiences in Italy where he travels with his professor wife and meditates on Italian history, art and currency. Part Two, playfully entitled " & Beyond," with two sections ("Missing Persons" and "The Bensonhurst Pigeon") is a fantasy of sorts that involves young Antonio who witnesses what could be a real-life make over of "The Maltese Falcon"; in many ways it becomes a projection of the author's dreams and nightmares and echoes ideas and actions of Part One. Cleverly punctuating the sections are interesting photographs taken by Valerio that enhance the reading experience. In the end, we're not quite sure how to categorize the writing for if it is really a memoir, as the book's back cover suggests, then what are we to make of the appearances of a Fat Man, ex-cop, a Baronessa, Bridget O'Shaunessey, Sam Spade and their search for the real "Maltese Falcon." We can only imagine that these are extensions of the people in Antonio's life--self projections that happen in an extended fiction realized only in the author's mind shaped by such cinemati

The Little Sailor: Quintessence of an Ouvre

The Little Sailor (Daisy H Productions, 2005) is an attractively packaged, double-cd audio book, which the author reads in a mellow, lilting baritone resonant with the timbre of New York's Italian colonies. Like most of Valerio's narrative fiction, The Little Sailor alchemically combines personal and popular cultural histories; but unlike the earlier work, this opus resolves the logic and emotion of its protagonist's episodic memory in a linear plot, transmuting the Little Sailor's childhood experience of his community (particularly its women) in the first section, "Brooklyn, Rome," into the action of second section, "The Bensonhurst Pigeon," a whimsical adaptation of Hammett's and Huston's The Maltese Falcon. The Little Sailor exists only within the Italian American community from which his alter ego, Antonio, finds himself estranged. In "Brooklyn, Rome" Valerio presents scenes of the Little Sailor's fascination with the community's women. This fascination begins with his mother, one of the many feminine deities to whose power he bears awed witness. For the Little Sailor, the "dark Italian widow" is the center of a muliebral universe. For Antonio, she is almost something else. "Naked, crawling from the foot of his bunk toward him the dark voluptuous woman was about to become an object of masturbatory fancy. But then, suddenly, she disappeared. After all, she was his mother." His mother, like Dante's Beatrice, is a fancy. While his Bensonhurst, like Dante's Florence, is both a myth and an incestuous, close, if not entirely closed, society. Beautiful, forceful women, from the pre-pubescent girl Thrill to the widow Mrs. Tanzi, whirl around him, becoming sovereign avatars. Because of them he will worship goddesses his entire fictional life. These women "opened him to the Sibyl's Voice of Truth, which told him of the mysteries, with room for his splendid, silent voice, but with no answers." They also allow him to carry his knowledge of "the mysteries" beyond Bensonhurst. In several "goddess" vignettes at the end of "Brooklyn, Rome," and in "The Bensonhurst Pigeon," the adult Antonio encounters goddesses who, unlike the beatified Beatrice, are entirely human. The "Goddess of New York," a revenant of Lefty from Lefty and the Button Men, is all carnality, while Brigid O'Shaunessy, a goddess of cinema, is no longer the perfectly young and seductive Mary Astor. "Now she appeared as old as she was. Her figure was still svelte, angular, a bit more fleshy. The tedium of barbaric prison life had weighed on her back, pressing forward her shoulders, which, in turn, caved in upon her chest." The earthiest of Valerio's goddesses are the tough-talking, intrepid and imperious "Italianist Professor" Ellen Rothenberg, a. k. a. the Baronessa, wife of aged Antonio's Doppelgänger, the Fat Man; and the hunch-backed grocer's daughter, Frances Palermo, a character magically transported from the Little Sailor's Bensonhurst, around whom the tortuous plot turns. The double