Between Two Rivers - Softcover

Nicholas Rinaldi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0552771813 ISBN 13: 9780552771818

Publisher: Black Swan, 2005

Synopsis

Within the walls of Echo Terrace, the world&hellip, Farro Fescu is the concierge of Echo Terrace, an apartment block in New York City. Passing through his lobby at all hours of the night and day is an exotic cross-section of the world's An Egyptian born plastic surgeon who lives on the fifth floor and specialise

About this title

About the Author

Nicholas Rinaldi is the author of two previous novels, The Jukebox Queen of Malta and Bridge Fall Down, and three collections of poetry. His stories and poems have appeared widely in literary journals around the world. He teaches literature and creative writing at FairfieldUniversity, and lives in Connecticut with his wife, Jackie.

From Publishers Weekly

Intertwining stories by the author of The Jukebox Queen of Malta offer subtle portraits of the residents of Echo Terrace, a fictitious Battery Park building in which the condominiums are named after the likes of Mae West, Susan B. Anthony and Grandma Moses. At the book's center is the inimitable Romanian concierge, Farro Fescu, who watches with keen eyes the comings and goings of the intriguing inhabitants, including Karl Vogel, a Luftwaffe pilot engaged in an affair with a journalist whose grandfather was killed by a Nazi fighter pilot ("She is making peace with the enemy," Karl thinks); Yesenia, a captivating 19-year-old housemaid who is brutally raped on the way home to her Queens apartment; and Theo, a plastic surgeon who falls for a widow whose husband admitted to an affair and shortly thereafter died of a heart attack. Devastated, the woman, Nora, poisons her exotic pets ("Whatever I love, I make it die") and then walks into traffic. With Nora in a coma, her young actress niece, Angela, moves into her apartment and enters into an unlikely affair with a poem-quoting undertaker who is convinced that love can conquer all. Among a few bizarre twists, a young designer falls (or is pushed) from a window, and Theo is drafted by the FBI to perform a sex-change operation on one of Augusto Pinochet's collaborators. These are complex, moving stories without straightforward resolutions-as one character remarks, "Life is heavy, it weighs"-and if they feel a bit overwritten sometimes, Rinaldi compensates for this with multifaceted and memorable characters.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Black Swan
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0552771813
• ISBN 13: 9780552771818
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1