Invisible Cities/Visible Cities: Reliving her time as a little girl, the narrator recounts how her joy bubbles over: “It was absurd, but we were all three drunk with this it was very strange we woke every morning in a strange hotel, in a strange city.” All the sights and sounds so alive, so vivid and beautiful, it is as if our little girl is traveling in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities made visible.
Sidebar: Personally, I love when a male author tells a tale from the point of view of a first-person woman narrator. The Power of Memory: I know a lot! I know about happiness! So proclaims a young woman describing for us a day and a night when she was a seven-year-old girl traveling in Italy with her mother and father. Rather than making general statements about a number of stories, as a way of sharing some Harold Brodkey splendor, I will focus on one shorter piece that will remain with me always: Published as part of the 1980s Vintage Contemporaries series, this magnificent collection contains 18 stories, some short, some long, 5 pages to 50 pages, but all of these stories speak to the feeling tone of memory and are expressed in such lyrical, elegant language, they are enough to take your breath away. Harold Brodkey (1930 – 1996) is a major twentieth-century American writer of highly polished, highly poetic fiction first published in The New Yorker, Esquire and other magazines over a thirty years span, 1960s through the 1990s.
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