Richard Siciliano

Portrait in Broken Glass Richard Siciliano

A quest for redemption or an exercise in futility...? In the late 1930s in a Southern port city, Joseph Curcio meets his former student Amanda, who is now a street artist selling mosaics made of broken glass and who offers Joseph a place to stay at the abandoned fisherman's cabin where she lives. Joseph is an indifferent, homeless ex-alcoholic who once considered himself a progressive intellectual and the future mayor of his city. Now he begins to find strength in his platonic friendship with Amanda and resolves to resurrect his career by writing an autobiographical journal-a diary in which he hopes to confront and understand his failures, his lost idealism, and his past relationships with his immigrant father and the woman he once loved. What he cannot see, however, are the character flaws that were his undoing and which will take him once again from the brink of success to tragedy, violence-and possibly even death. This is Joseph Curcio's mosaic journal, composed of fragments of memory, pieces of accomplishment, holes of loss, and shards of guilt and regret too sharp to touch