John Fante

Svevo Bandini, an Italian immigrant, and his wife Maria and son Arturo struggle to survive another Colorado winter

Wait Until Spring, Bandini

I had a lot of jobs in Los Angeles Harbor because our family was poor and my father was dead. My first job was ditchdigging a short time after I graduated from high school. Every night I couldn’t sleep from the pain in my back. We were digging an excavation in an empty lot, there wasn’t any shade, the sun came straight from a cloudless sky, and I was down in that hole digging with two huskies who dug with a love for it, always laughing and telling jokes, laughing and smoking bitter tobacco.

The Road to Los Angeles

Chiedi alla polvere

Avi Pardo

Toza sor

Trapped in a small, poverty-ridden town in 1933, under pressure from his father to go into the family business, seventeen-year-old Dominic Molise yearns to fulfill his own dreams.

1933 Was A Bad Year

Ask the Dust is a virtuoso performance by an influential master of the twentieth-century American novel. It is the story of Arturo Bandini, a young writer in 1930s Los Angeles who falls hard for the elusive, mocking, unstable Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress. Struggling to survive, he perseveres until, at last, his first novel is published. But the bright light of success is extinguished when Camilla has a nervous breakdown and disappears . . . and Bandini forever rejects the writer's life he fought so hard to attain.

Ask the Dust

Henry Molise, a fifty-year-old successful writer, returns to the family home to help with the latest drama; his elderly parents want to divorce. Henry's tyrannical, bricklaying father, Nick, despite being weakened by age and alcoholism, can still strike fear into the hearts of his sons. His mother, ill and devoutly Catholic, still has the power both to comfort and confuse her children. Nick has been offered some well-paid work to build a smokehouse in the hills, and Henry, realising this might be the last chance they have to reconcile things, agrees to lend a hand. What he doesn't appreciate is how much this journey is going to change his view of his father. The Brotherhood of the Grape is vintage Fante, brimming with love, death, violence and religion. Writing with great passion, Fante powerfully describes the damage that family can wreak upon us all.Praise for The Brotherhood of the Grape: 'Fante was my God.' — Charles Bukowski 'Fante was capable of expressing thought and experience with an honesty that was as intimate as it was evocative, and as magical as it was true.' — Time Out 'John Fante is one of the great unheralded voices in American fiction.' — The Face

The Brotherhood of the Grape

riwāyah

Isʼal al-ghubār

Arturo Bandini arrives in Los Angeles with big dreams. But the reality he finds is a city gripped by poverty. When he makes a small fortune from the publication of a short story, he reinvents himself, indulging in expensive clothes, fine food and downtown strip clubs. But Bandini's delusions take a worrying turn when he is drawn into a relationship with Camilla Lopez, a beautiful but troubled young woman who will be responsible for his greatest downfall. Ask the Dust is an unforgettable novel about outsiders looking in on a town built on celluloid dreams.

In the definitive biography of John Fante, English and film studies professor Stephen Cooper explores the life of a man whose muse was Los Angeles.

Full of Life

Pregúntale al polvo

My first collision with fame was hardly memorable. I was a busboy at Marx's Deli. The year was 1934. The place was Third and Hill, Los Angeles. I was twenty-one years old, living in a world bounded on the west by Bunker Hill, on the east by Los Angeles Street, on the south by Pershing Square, and on the north by Civic Center. I was a busboy nonpareil, with great verve and style for the profession, and though I was dreadfully underpaid (one dollar a day plus meals) I attracted considerable attention as I whirled from table to table, balancing a tray on one hand, and eliciting smiles from my customers. I had something else beside a waiter's skill to offer my patrons, for I was also a writer.

Dreams from Bunker Hill

Después de Pregúntale al polvo y las otras tres novelas protagonizadas por Arturo Bandini, presentamos ahora un nuevo título de John Fante, donde aparecen los personajes tiernos y rencorosos, emocionantes y divertidos, en suma, memorables, que componen La hermandad de la uva , una pandilla de consumados borrachines El mejor cantero de América, el viejo Nick Molise, tiránico y orgulloso, está de nuevo en crisis con su mujer Ninguno de los hijos quiere intervenir; por otra parte, Nick, que «habría sido más feliz si no hubiera tenido descendencia sus hijos habían sido los clavos que lo habían crucificado a mi madre», no tiene intención de pedir nada a nadie, y menos cuando se lo pasa de maravilla con sus viejos amigos y, a pesar de la edad, alberga un montón de proyectos Puede flirtear, beber y vanagloriarse tanto como quiera de su gran pasado («San Elmo era su Louvre, la exposición donde el mundo podía ver sus obras») Su sueño, tampoco demasiado secreto, era una tribu de hijos-albañiles seguidores de su arte, y en cambio tiene que habérselas con un guardafrenos, un empleadillo de banca y un escritor A despecho de su innata pereza, Henry –un álter ego de John Fante– deja mujer e hijos y se embarca en un avión para sumergirse en el mundo de sus padres Cuando llega a San Elmo, su padre lo pilla desprevenido invitándolo a una empresa tan absurda como inútil- construir un secadero de pieles de ciervo, en un pueblo imposible a dos mil metros de altura Henry en un principio duda, después acepta, atraído por la panda de chiflados amiguitos de papá «Francis Ford Coppola se enamoró de esta novela, que publicó por entregas en City Magazine y quiso llevarla al cine Por desgracia, el fracaso financiero de Apocalypse Now hizo inviable el proyecto Indiscutiblemente, La hermandad de la uva es una excelente cosecha Fante» (Brice Matthieussent) «Basta leer una sola página de Fante para que se imponga la evidencia- su estilo es uno de los más vigorosos, eficaces y modernos que jamás haya leído Con él, la frase escrita se desembaraza de la más ligera traza de almidón, se despoja del cuello duro y del chaleco apretado, deja de mirarse en el espejo para verificar con inquietud su prestancia» (Pierre Lepape, Le Monde) «La constante más embriagadora de los escritos de John Fante alcanza aquí su apoteosis La hermandad de la uva, más que cualquier otra novela suya, es para beberla de un solo trago» (Art Books)

La hermandad de la uva

Bahara kadar bekle, Bandını

1933 berbat bir yıldı

One of the great outsider figures of twentieth-century literature, John Fante possessed a style of deceptive simplicity, full of emotional immediacy and tremendous psychological point. Among the novels, short stories and screenplays that comprised his career, Fante's crowning accomplishments were, for many, his four stories about a certain uncomplicated character from the hills of Abruzzi. Collected together in one volume for the first time, The Bandini Quartet tells of Arturo Bandini, Fante's fictional alter ego, an impoverished young Italian-American who, armed with only a Jesuit high school education and the insane desire to write novels, escapes his suffocating home in Colorado to seek glory in a Depression-era Los Angeles. This edition also includes the first-ever UK publication of Dreams From Bunker Hill, the brilliant and final novel which a blind and wheelchair-bound Fante, nearing his death bed, dictated to his wife Joyce.

The Bandini Quartet

Dans les années trente, Arturo Bandini, fils d'immigrés italiens, quitte le Colorado pour l'Eldorado, Los Angeles, avec son unique roman en poche et un rêve : devenir un écrivain reconnu. Vénérant les femmes et la littérature, il débarque dans une chambre d'hôtel miteuse, prêt à saisir la vie à bras-le-corps. Une errance sublime parmi les laissés-pour-compte du rêve américain. 

John Fante

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