Word: donato
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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THREE CIRCLES OF LIGHT (246 pp.) -Piefro d! Donato-Julian Messner...
...Pietro di Donato sees it, writing and bricklaying have a lot in common: "Your bread is not adulterated, not taken from another. You are creating something that will be here when your vegetable self has departed." In 1939, after Bricklayer di Donato turned to writing and his autobiographical Christ in Concrete became a bestseller, success paradoxically robbed him of both crafts: "I became too sophisticated for bricklaying and too confused to write...
...Donato was a conscientious objector in World War II, eventually settled with his wife on Long Island in a white, wooden colonial house ("I was so sick of brick") and tried to overcome his writer's block. By 1958 he managed to publish a sex potboiler, This Woman. In his latest novel, he shows himself thoroughly unblocked. Revisiting the scene of his first book-the Italian colony of West Hoboken, N.J.-he has written a piece of immigrant Americana that has no more narrative line than an antipasto, but glints with passion and pathos, cruelty and laughter...
...pagan appetite in Author di Donato's book and no more sinful than salami. However, Mama does break up Papa's affair when Delia goes so far as to have a child by him. Mama's triumph is brief; short weeks later, Papa is pinned to death under a collapsing wall. As the keening women cluster about the open coffin, Paolino seems to hear in their voices a lament for his dead boyhood...