Inverno

by Cynthia Zarin

A daring, heartbreaking novel, Inverno is the book that J. D. Salinger’s Franny Glass might have written a few decades into her adulthood.

Caroline waited for fifteen minutes in the snow. After a little time had passed, she was simply waiting to see what would happen. It was entirely possible he would not come. If he did not come, she would be in a different story than the one she had imagined, but it was possible, she knew, to imagine anything.

Inverno is a love story that stretches across decades. Inverno is also the story of Caroline, waiting in Central Park, in a snowstorm, for her phone to ring, yards from where, thirty years ago, Alastair, as a boy, hid in the trees. Will he call? Won’t he? The story moves the way the mind years flash by in an instant―now we are in the perilous world of fairy tale, now stranded anew in childhood, with its sorrows and harsh words. Ever-present are the complicated negotiations of the heart.

How does love make and unmake a life? This startling and brilliantly original novel by Cynthia Zarin, the author of An Enlarged Heart , is a kaleidoscope in which the past and the present shatter. Elliptical and inventive in the mode of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights , Inverno is miraculous and startlingly true.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Romance, Novels, American, Literary Fiction, Adult

144 pages, Hardcover

Published January 9, 2024

About the author

Cynthia Zarin is the author of five books of poetry, as well five books for children and a collection of essays. She teaches at Yale and lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Steve Donoghue]

Imagine a novella that opens with a lovely young woman waiting in the snow in Central Park, cellphone in hand, hoping her long-time friend and lover will call. Now you have the opening premise of Cynthia Zarin's new book. Unfortunately, you also have the middle section and the end, plus most of the stuff in between. While she's waiting, the novella's character randomly thinks about things. My full review: https://openlettersreview.com/posts/i...

[Divs · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received an advance copy in exchange for this review.

I love Cynthis Zarin’s work; she’s an incredible poet, and this transfers to her prose, which is lyrical and lush and atmospheric. As a result, this book is all of those things by virtue of its writing. The structure is fascinating—but nearly impossible to follow. There are no chapters or breaks, and the chronology is completely fractured. We are tentatively following the love story of Caroline and Alistair across their whole lives, but also we are examining the relationship between the narrator and the reader, and also delving into various plays, fairy tales, novels, songs, movies, etc. It reads like a novel that was cut up, mixed around, and spliced with a collection of essays.

Three stars because this is obviously a very creative and ambitious novel, the writing is gorgeous, and there are brief snatches of clarity to be found while reading that are rewarding. But I think the overall execution was entirely too confusing for me, making it very difficult to follow what was happening. As a result, I couldn’t get a sense of who the characters were in of themselves and to each other, and so I didn’t care much about their relationship. The pieces of commentary on various forms of media interspersed in the story were interesting at first, but they became tedious to follow and disrupted any sense of chronology I tried to form.

If you really enjoy hybrid genre novels with inventive structures, you may very well love this book. There were definitely quotes I saved because they were so beautiful (the writing really is incredible.) I just don’t think it worked for me.

[Jolene · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prose by poets is one of my favorite genres: Hanif Abdurraqib, Ocean Vuong, Patricia Lockwood... And now Cynthia Zarin, too. This novel is an incantation -- a strange, elliptical little story that only a poet could have written.

A woman stands in the snow, waiting for her phone to ring, while a block away and decades earlier, the man, who may or may not call, is a boy, writing his name in the frozen dirt. Zarin circles back to this moment -- and so many moments before and after this one -- again and again. The analogy that comes to mind is the spirograph kit I spent hours with as a kid. (Or maybe I didn't.) We circle back and the arc of the circle changes a little and then a little more, and I can see how all that repetition and all those small changes might be tiring. But I was charmed, swept up.

Like every other reviewer here, I didn't fully *get* it, but I also don't think *getting* it is the point. Inverno isn't a story with a beginning, middle, and end so much as a meditation on storytelling and how we shape the stories of our own lives. When you tell your current partner about your teenage self, they aren't getting to know who you were as a teenager; they're getting to know a character, a creation. How do you describe the house you grew up in? How do you describe your childhood summer? Your first love? As you grow older, which stories do you repeat again and again? Which details change a little bit or a lot? Which ones do you forget or leave out? Which ones pop into your head without warning as you're getting on a train or walking through a park? Are you remembering it right? Are you sure? (Who or what is your Alastairconstant??)

For a long time, Caroline thought that she was the single woman in that film who pours yesterday's cold coffee into her cup, stubs out her cigarette on the carpet, and is thwarted and betrayed by the man with whom she is in love, a mophead -- it's 1971 -- who makes light-filled glass sculptures and who also loves an older man who has a surgery in Harley Street. But she is wrong. In the film, the mophead betrays both his lovers, but she has not been betrayed, because in her own life nothing has been kept from her: she simply wants something that is not there, but she thinks if she keeps wanting it, her desire will be like water on stone, things will change. A form of magical thinking, making something of nothing. Caroline knows and does not know this. But she is in hiding under the mask of the woman who stubs out her cigarette, because she is also the man who makes glass sculptures which fill at dusk with blue light, a person who loves two or even three people at once. (Or, she used to be that person. Now she is not.)

Inverno is bewildering, yes, but so is life. In that, it's also deeply human.

[kells · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I’m too dumb to appreciate this

[Caroline Van · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sent to me by my mom this morning with a note saying “I didn’t really get it.” Read it over the course of the day—nice v day tradition possibly lol of reading a short romantic plot book in the day.

OKAY I’m dead bc every review roasts this book as boring n tedious and I basically think im like main character of it (it could just be name association though) plus I think this is exactly how I would write a book (rambling on tangents/time jumping all over the place, making it really unclear what is the present, talking about being tired of being in love with someone)? [“They are not exactly speaking to each other, but in some other way they do not ever stop speaking to each other.”] [“She will not do that again; she is older and wiser. (But she doesn’t, she does.)”] It is basically the story of a woman waiting for a phone call from an old love, and replaying endless scenes of [him hiding his parents’ abuse, miscommunications between the two of them, meetups close past and far past that are still kept basically in the dark]. Can someone explain the ending to me tho? Who is you? Who is Otto?

Endless descriptive language, which was most fun to me when it was explaining something novel (like the very specific feeling of using a phone booth.)

Good quotes:
“I’ll come running to tie your shoe.”
“Caroline found herself snagged on this sentences. She circled it like a dog looking for a place to lie down. Often, she would worry a phrase for days. She was indiscriminate; it could be something she overheard, or a slogan. Skywriting.”
“Look, I’ve tried to tell you about myself, about what I’m like, over the years, but your mind, apparently, has always been somewhere else, unfortunately…”
“You see the can? Well, it doesn’t see you.”

Good words:
Cub reporter (or cub anything)
Treacly= excessively sentimental

Good lore:
“When P.L. Travers came to visit Yeats, she arrived with an armful of rowan branches, and he remarked that one would have been enough.”
Bob Dylan had an intimate phone convo with Joan Baez once and when asked about it and why he shared what he shared, he said, “It’s just that the moon is full, and you happened to call.”

Lowkey this cover does represent the book. I was like why did they pick this bad digital art for the cover and why does it look familiar, and then I realized it was an Alex Katz. Maybe this book is too resonant in its familiarity of a redundant, endless feeling (“How unwise it is to look back. But it is all we know, the pictures handing in our little hut of time”), or maybe it just isn’t that good.

[Joy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did not enjoy this book. It was so disjointed. What do they call this style? Stream of consciousness? Ugh, if I wanted random thoughts and memories, I'd listen to my own. At least I would understand it all. The terrible thing is, the writing was good, and parts of the book really caught my attention, but I had to force myself to finish. Some parts were so repetitive. I'm sure there are people who will love this. It just wasn't my style. At all.

#GoodreadsGiveaway

[michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I dont get it. It started out so promising and the writing is good. A woman waits at a snowy field for her love to call, 40 years ago he was a young boy in the same spot, in 3 yrs they will see each other a last time. I love a good space time continuum but it turned into a bit of stream of consciousness i could not follow.

[Valeria · Rating 2 out of 5]

At times a genuinely compelling novel emerged, flashing for a second, before quickly going back under this overthinking, meandering muck

[Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

A poet and New Yorker staff writer, Zarin's debut novel reminds me a lot of a book I read last year, Chinatown by Thuận. Rather than having a plot it is made of a looping string of memories, objects, themes, dreams and references to other literary and cinematic works that repeat throughout. I've never read Duras but by extension, from reviews I've read of the Thuận, this may too then be similar to Duras. Time is jumbled completely; a memory from 12 years ago, 30 years ago, and something from the current day will all share space on a single page. The book is a single long chapter. The prose is composed with a poet's obliqueness.

Trying to gain a foothold in this is challenging work. It is structured around a woman, Caroline, who right now is standing in the snow in Central Park waiting for a phone call from her lover of forty years ago, and of twenty years ago, and of possibly once again, Alastair.

She has not been betrayed, because in her own life nothing has been kept from her: she simply wants something that is not there, which she has been told is not there, but she thinks if she keeps wanting it, her desire will be like water on a stone, things will change.

She thinks of phones of forty years ago, of twenty years ago, and of mirrors, and of snow, and of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" and the troll who wants to make the world look ugly and the girl whose love rescues the boy, and of other lovers and their children, and of films, and Walker Percy, and of Jacques Lacan (I got more of the references in this text, at least!) Sometimes Zavin writes to a "you", who is maybe herself, and sometimes she does it in Italian ("inverno" is Italian for snow, I eventually suspected, and then confirmed).

But, I like plot. It's often one of the best things about novels. I missed it.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a poet’s novella not in the sense of being lyrical, but in the sense of being elliptical (in the sense of intentional obscurity) and in the sense of using repetition as a form of rhythm that holds the work together as much as this work's principal characters do, providing a different sort of plot (and, I should add, a different, fluid, sometimes powerful experience of time). This makes for a different kind of reading experience, one that I, like most Goodreads readers apparently, found at times frustrating, annoying, offputting, much as some modern poetry can be. And yet the experience is, over all, special and rewarding.

Whereas in such poetry I will often reread the poems that interest me, here the repetition makes that unnecessary. This novella is a rereading, within the compass of the characters and the repetition-plot, as well as in other forms (especially the fairy tale) and through literary references.

[Kristen Brida · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

i see the artfulness in the book—
through the nonlinearity, how desire annihilates time & sense

how imagination is the lifeblood of desire & cannot be as powerfully expressed?

the writing style is gorgeous and poetic.

and yet, this was a struggle to get through. I just was not invested in this book’s characters and was not sure what it was that pulled them together in the first place.

[Jessica Morse · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I wasn’t the target audience for this book - it is beautiful in places, but was completely incohesive to me.

[James B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. Caroline is sitting on a bench in Central Park as it begins to snow. She’s waiting for a call from Alastair, a boy she’s know for over thirty years. He’s not the love of her life, but she’s always had strong and confusing feelings about him as they have drifted in and out of each other’s lives. As she sits and waits for the call, so much of her life passes through her mind. Alastair, her husbands and children, her parents, but also plays she’s seen, poetry that’s moved her and lines from movies that you come back to over and over again, with a children’s fairy tale running throughout this slim novel.

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

Occasionally incandescent prose, lifts off the page in exhilarating flights of yearning, grief and the elusive desire to know what memories can hold, and if they can embody a kind of truth. But alas, it is often also self indulgent with irrelevancies (for the reader) tromping muddy footprints over the oft-invoked snow.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Her prose pulled me in like a strong tide and didn't let go. I didn't understand the ending but I don't understand any of our endings.

[talia ♡]

if you describe a book saying it is the "book that j.d. salinger’s franny glass might have written a few decades into her adulthood," then i, as the formal AND official spokesperson for franny glass (she is me i am her) must read it immediately

[Catherine T · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of elements that really appeal to me, and I did love parts, but a novel this short needs to feel almost perfect throughout to leave the right impression, and this just wasn't quite there for me.

[Steph · Rating 2 out of 5]

really hard to follow
always felt like I was missing something

[Anne Gafiuk · Rating 1 out of 5]

I just did not get it.

[Victoria · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite possibly the biggest mess I've ever read.

[Eva B.]

You had me at "Franny Glass"

[Jennifer Moyer · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was taxing on me. The not so love affair storyline, flashbacks and forwards was all just too exhausting. I dragged my feet just to finish it. Which put me in an even worse position as I found myself re-reading and still having many questions. I guess it was just way too experimental for my taste.

[Carey Calvert · Rating 5 out of 5]

To fully enjoy the scope, depth, and breadth of Cynthia Zarin’s debut novel, Inverno, it is supremely important to know Zarin is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Orbit, and The Ada Poems.

“Inverno,” named for the Italian word for winter, begins with Caroline waiting in Central Park for a phone call from Alastair, her longtime on and off again lover.

It is the dead of winter in this ambiguous yet always pining debut novel.

… a cold and snowy day in February.

Will he call? Does he call?

At just 132 pages, it shan’t be long.

In the meantime, we’re fascinated by Caroline’s musings and reminiscences that bend and fold time.

Inverno is a love story. One set on repeat but you wouldn’t know it until close to the end – “You’ve told us already,” her children tell us.

Throughout, we’re reminded that stories that are repeated are the important ones. 

That the very point of the story is that it is repeated. That inside the story is a fairy tale, one in which Caroline will tell us the end first.

“Because the beginning is the same as any beginning.”

The phone booth is near where thirty years ago, Alastair, as a boy hid in the trees.

We know that Caroline and Alastair are doomed but we, like Caroline hold onto the same hopes and dreams.

At times to find there is no one to whom we can hand over our dreams.

“Shall I tell it the way you would tell a story?”

The poet in Zarin would never.

That’s the beauty, the fun, and the heartbreak of Inverno.

How often do you relive your own love story?

[chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

I sense there is a story here somewhere. Perhaps it is actually too disjointed or perhaps I'm just preoccupied with the question of whether Caroline is in the snow because it's poetic or because she thinks phones only work indoors when corded.

[Lee · Rating 2 out of 5]

not about love but rather mental illness // definitely
not a novel lol wtf

[Kathleen Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Both baffling and beautiful, this is a challenge to follow but worthy of your time if you are a fan of experimental fiction. Cynthia is sitting in the snow waiting for a phone call from Alastair and thinking about her life. It's non linear, the Snow Queen is recounted, and it's not always clear what's happening. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. Definitely not for everyone but intriguing.

[Ives Phillips · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF'd at 20%. Wow, I don't think I have ever DNF'd a book so quickly (maybe The Scarlet Letter). I knew that when the author started describing an old-fashioned telephone down to the holes in the receiver, it was not going to be the book for me.

[Caroline]

DNF - I loved that this was such a specific UES New York story, but I couldn't engage with the blunt, time-bending style

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to love this book because I've loved Cynthia Zarin's nonfiction, but this was a slow read for me and I didn't find it quite as compelling as I wanted to. That said, I didn't hate it, and it might be a good book for me to reread in winter, when the outside world matches the space of the book better. Because, as the title tells us, this is a (mostly) wintry book, with lots of imagery of snow and ice, and repeated references to The Snow Queen. At one point in this book, "the story of the Snow Queen" is described as "a tale in which the ending takes a long time to happen, as if it were a story unfolding inside a story, an origami snowflake that holds another snowflake, until it retreats into a shard of salt," which is, (perhaps not surprisingly), a decent description of this book as well. This book repeats itself, repeats images and sentences and themes; at one point children are described as not yet knowing "that the stories that are repeated are the important ones, that the point of the story is that it is repeated, that inside the story is a fairytale." Which, again, describes this book.

In terms of plot, there isn't much of it: a woman, Caroline, waits in the snow in Central Park for a man, Alastair, to call her. But that's the story inside the story: there's also a narrator talking to someone else—a woman talking to a man. The man and the woman, like Caroline and Alastair, are or were lovers; time is shifty in this book. (Caroline and Alastair have known each other for decades; we get memories and moments from throughout their relationship at various points in the novel.) Thematically the book explores love, and love lost, and deception, and connection, and lack thereof. The telephone is an almost talismanic object in the narrative; we get long descriptions of what it was like to talk on the phone before cell phones and cordless phones and answering machines, when there were many working phone booths on city street corners and "if someone called and you picked up, they knew where you were."

The narrative is very associative, which works for me; Caroline thinks about how "each snarled thread leads to something else, many other things, too many" and talks about liking Oblique Strategies. There are references to Caroline's childhood memories (playing board games, briefly being a Brownie) and to songs (often about telephones) and to films (a lot of which I haven't seen, so I think those references were somewhat lost on me). And the writing is often really beautiful, like, for example, this: "Along any road in the country the telephone poles stretched for miles, timber poles with wires looping over them, a chain stitch across the map." Or this: "The fireflies in a dome above the field, fixed as constellations, a ring around the rose, circling the earth." Or this: "The lights, like snow globes, illuminated the falling sharp-edged snowflakes, snow like stars, a Pleiades of snow." At one point Caroline writing to Alastair is described as "a ghost writing to a ghost," and I like that a lot—how when Caroline writes to this person with whom she was romantically involved when they were both young, their present selves dissolve, even as their past selves remain out of reach.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not much on stream of consciousness writing, but sometimes the stream of consciousness style serves an important literary purpose. In Virginia Wolff's Mrs. Dalloway, I felt that it fairly represented how the title character's mind worked; in Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer it was a metaphor for the protagonist's directionless nomadic existence and the absurdity of the universe; in Clarice Lispector's Near to the Wild Heart it created a viewport into the soul of a unique person who was very different from you and me. So what the heck was the purpose of it in this book? It's not really how Caroline's mind works; it's not a representation of her or the author's worldview. Why would you want to confuse the reader with this convoluted and fractured style? Then I read that Ms. Zarin is a poet. Oh, I get it, this is poetry. Ms. Zarin isn't really telling a story so much as she is creating a mood, bombarding us with images, symbols, themes that weave in and out of the telling. Without much of a plot, this collage lets us come away with the impression of a life. So we are snowed under by endless references to cold, ice, snow and winter. Standing in Central Park in the snow, the fairy tale of the Snow Queen, winter in Maine, a long running relationship that is more cold than hot. It goes on and on. And then there are fairies, brownies, and magic, the magic of love. But what kind of awful love is this? Constant in its inconstancy. Needing to return to the loved one again and again, knowing and perhaps desiring that it will end badly yet again. And like a poem there is repetition, phrases that pop up again and again in different contexts like Wagner's leitmotivs, announcing a character or an emotion or a state of mind. I don't know. I'm making it sound good, but I found the experience of reading it dissatisfying. I have been reading more poetry lately, but I like my poetry to either be broad and grand or compact and well formed where every word adds to the fabric of meaning. Inverno did not fall into either of those categories. It is diffuse. It wanders. So do the characters, I suppose, so in that sense it is consistent, but I would have liked it better if their somewhat directionless lifelong quest for love could have been held in a more structured poetic framework, or if Ms. Zarin had used her not inconsiderable skills at beautiful writing to tell a more straightforward story.