Marino Magliani

A Window to Zeewijk - Crossings Marino Magliani

Fiction. Italian American Studies. Translated by Zachary Scalzo. Marino Magliani is an original, wild writer. When Magliani writes--he actually paints, sculpts, films. All your senses are stimulated. You will read this novel, in the magnificent translation of Zachary Scalzo, and you won't find one weak, anonymous line; each sentence is a vision, crafted with passion. The architecture of his stories and of his syntax is not similar to anything else in contemporary Italian Literature. Maybe you can find some traces in the history of literature: in Kafka and the great South American novelists and poets or in Italo Calvino and Francesco Biamonti. And speaking of Calvino and Biamonti, Marino Magliani is from Liguria, too, a son of that narrow, harsh region, tightly gripped between the aggressive sea to the South and the jagged mountains to the North. Magliani's prose--in this novel as elsewhere--absorbs those colors, nuances, fragrances and, in A WINDOW TO ZEEWIJKA, overlaps them continuously with the colors of a little Dutch suburb not far from Amsterdam, where Magliani currently lives.