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So Much Smoke
The short stories in So Much Smoke owe much to Félix Calvino’s own experiences as a migrant who moved from the Galicia region of Spain to Australia, a country and culture radically different from the peasant village he left behind. The majority of the stories chronicle the hardships and small joys of village life, while the Australian stories tell of the migrant experience in which all that is known is forfeited in the search for material security.
- GenresShort Stories
150 pages, Paperback
Published December 1, 2016
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456 people want to read
About the author
Felix Calvino
7 books123 followersFelix Calvino’s short stories are subtle and soulful, of life growing up in the villages of northern Spain under Franco, and in Australia, where the ghosts and habits of the old country have not vanished.
You can find more information at
my website
https://www.facebook.com/felixcalvino...
Felix Calvino's Fiction http://ahatfulofcherries.blogspot.com/
http://www.scholarly.info/author/84/
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 7 reviews
August 10, 2024
When I was two, we were living in Denver. It was winter. I started coughing. Dad smoked, so he drove me out to the farm.
Before marriage, Grandma had been a nurse. One night in the kitchen, in the glow of the cast-iron stove, she lay me on the kitchen table. A country doctor arrived. My body had turned blue. I was pronounced dead.
The doc left. Grandma picked me up by my ankles and pounded on my back.
For years after that, I was prone to pleurisy. A chest pain like some food caught mid-chest, in the area of the heart.
In "The Dream Girl," the most popular girl in school takes an uncanny fancy to an awkward, intelligent, sensitive, country bumpkin from Galicia whose second language is Spanish.
Felix has a gift. He writes about enduring love with rare, aching subtlety, purity, and innocence.
I'm an editor. Many writers I know treasure "The Dream Girl" above most anything. A secret Muse.
Before marriage, Grandma had been a nurse. One night in the kitchen, in the glow of the cast-iron stove, she lay me on the kitchen table. A country doctor arrived. My body had turned blue. I was pronounced dead.
The doc left. Grandma picked me up by my ankles and pounded on my back.
For years after that, I was prone to pleurisy. A chest pain like some food caught mid-chest, in the area of the heart.
In "The Dream Girl," the most popular girl in school takes an uncanny fancy to an awkward, intelligent, sensitive, country bumpkin from Galicia whose second language is Spanish.
Felix has a gift. He writes about enduring love with rare, aching subtlety, purity, and innocence.
I'm an editor. Many writers I know treasure "The Dream Girl" above most anything. A secret Muse.
Read
July 19, 2017Once again, deceptively simple prose which I imagine is not easy to pull off--fantastic writing, really! I just wish there weren't such stark polarities, severe/earthly or celestial, when it came to the women represented. But nonetheless these stories of Spain and migration to Australia are really well done. They inspire me to read more Spanish literature, to hear from those female voices--some were outlined in a lovely story, 'The Dream Girl'. There's a rhythm to Calvino's voice I've come to expect now, you know you're safe with his erudite abilities. I particularly liked 'The Hen' and the final story 'The Valley of the Butterflies'. Not sure what to rate it, too hard to settle with collections, suffice it to say it's high and I enjoy his writing, recommend it, and will keep track of his work.
March 28, 2018
Perhaps the most underrated writer in Australia. These are beautiful stories.
Read
January 28, 2017The short stories that make up Felix Calvino’s book So Much Smoke are oddly familiar. Perhaps there is something universal in the migrant experience that is transmitted through his delicate prose. Perhaps it’s because of the distinctive coupling of nostalgia and immediacy that make up these dreamlike stories. The settings are charged with tenderness and a sense of loss, even when action is present tense.
The stories are mostly very short, with the exception of “The Smile”, which is almost a novella in length. In nearly all of these stories, the conflict occurs in the spaces between action – in dreams, in prophesy, in a growing self-awareness, and in memory. In the first story, a young girl’s dreams are prophetic. Her mother worries she will be called names at school. Though the story has a hint of a dark edge to it, it pivots on moments of tenderness that seem to exist in an alternate space. In another story, a boy, the narrator, agrees to kill a hen for his mother, but the job is harder than it looks. When the boy uses a shotgun rather than a knife to do the dirty work, his maturity is called into question. In “What Do You Know About Your Friends”, the family home is left to two brothers after a father dies intestate. This is one of many stories about death and inheritance. The brothers have different ideas about how to manage the home and one is left struggling to manage his place on his own. In the title piece, a forty-year old man inherits the family home on his mother’s death, but as the will states that he must take the house unencumbered he has to pay bills he can’t afford. In each of these stories, there is a strong visual impressions—almost like a painting—that create the tension. The activity almost feels beside the point against these visuals. Each scene is set up in careful detail like a tableau:
The feeling created is one of heaviness: an inertia that the characters have to struggle against. There is politics, but it is subtle. We know that Franco’s Spain is both home in the Ithaca sense – beautiful in memory, but also the place that must be escaped. Poverty, unemployment, and fear provide the backdrop. It has already been left. Sydney too, the destination, becomes defamiliarised. The protagonists are always struggling with identity; always outsiders marked by mannerism, clothing, accent. These characters tend to be caught – the role of migrant becoming a permanent state of being rather than a transitory one. It’s an uncomfortable space, where the conflict is not caused by action but by a struggle for meaning – a coming into being that never quite actualises. The plight of the migrant is a recurrent theme in all of these stories, and the ‘migratory’ process is not always a motion from place to place but also occurs through time and memory and through linguistic process, language becoming a metaphor for the self. In “The Dream Girl”, Gabriel works hard to read and write in his native Galician, discovering the work of Rosalía de Castro, a Galician author, and finds some meaning in the discovery of his transition:
Though the stories are very much in the literary realist tradition - much of the plots centre around everyday activities, depicted without overt artifice, there is an air of magic that pervades the work. Calvino handles it very subtly, rooting the magic in natural occurrences like sleepwalking, superstition, fever, premonitions, and grief. Always there’s a sense that the world is not quite fixed and that what we’re experiencing is illusory (so much smoke), and charged by scars, memories, hunger, and all that we’ve lost. The stories that make up So Much Smoke are powerful, not so much because of what happens, but because of the way they hint at how much lurks below the surface. Though the work is rooted in the settings that Calvino creates so well, there is always a self-referential modernism that keeps pushing against a linguistic otherness: the unsettling nature of language and the shock of transition. So Much Smoke is a nuanced collection, full of place, space, and subtle epiphany.
The stories are mostly very short, with the exception of “The Smile”, which is almost a novella in length. In nearly all of these stories, the conflict occurs in the spaces between action – in dreams, in prophesy, in a growing self-awareness, and in memory. In the first story, a young girl’s dreams are prophetic. Her mother worries she will be called names at school. Though the story has a hint of a dark edge to it, it pivots on moments of tenderness that seem to exist in an alternate space. In another story, a boy, the narrator, agrees to kill a hen for his mother, but the job is harder than it looks. When the boy uses a shotgun rather than a knife to do the dirty work, his maturity is called into question. In “What Do You Know About Your Friends”, the family home is left to two brothers after a father dies intestate. This is one of many stories about death and inheritance. The brothers have different ideas about how to manage the home and one is left struggling to manage his place on his own. In the title piece, a forty-year old man inherits the family home on his mother’s death, but as the will states that he must take the house unencumbered he has to pay bills he can’t afford. In each of these stories, there is a strong visual impressions—almost like a painting—that create the tension. The activity almost feels beside the point against these visuals. Each scene is set up in careful detail like a tableau:
The early morning autumn sky was grey as he stood and listened to the silence. At the far end of the yard, under the mango tree, the neighbour’s black and white cat watched intently for birds. (“The Smile”)
The feeling created is one of heaviness: an inertia that the characters have to struggle against. There is politics, but it is subtle. We know that Franco’s Spain is both home in the Ithaca sense – beautiful in memory, but also the place that must be escaped. Poverty, unemployment, and fear provide the backdrop. It has already been left. Sydney too, the destination, becomes defamiliarised. The protagonists are always struggling with identity; always outsiders marked by mannerism, clothing, accent. These characters tend to be caught – the role of migrant becoming a permanent state of being rather than a transitory one. It’s an uncomfortable space, where the conflict is not caused by action but by a struggle for meaning – a coming into being that never quite actualises. The plight of the migrant is a recurrent theme in all of these stories, and the ‘migratory’ process is not always a motion from place to place but also occurs through time and memory and through linguistic process, language becoming a metaphor for the self. In “The Dream Girl”, Gabriel works hard to read and write in his native Galician, discovering the work of Rosalía de Castro, a Galician author, and finds some meaning in the discovery of his transition:
Adjustment is a complex subject. Many of them [Galician migrants] have managed a measure of success, but the other life, the one up to the point of departure, is always etched in their memories. No matter how well integrated they are in the adoped society, each of them has his or her concealed hinterland. (121).
Though the stories are very much in the literary realist tradition - much of the plots centre around everyday activities, depicted without overt artifice, there is an air of magic that pervades the work. Calvino handles it very subtly, rooting the magic in natural occurrences like sleepwalking, superstition, fever, premonitions, and grief. Always there’s a sense that the world is not quite fixed and that what we’re experiencing is illusory (so much smoke), and charged by scars, memories, hunger, and all that we’ve lost. The stories that make up So Much Smoke are powerful, not so much because of what happens, but because of the way they hint at how much lurks below the surface. Though the work is rooted in the settings that Calvino creates so well, there is always a self-referential modernism that keeps pushing against a linguistic otherness: the unsettling nature of language and the shock of transition. So Much Smoke is a nuanced collection, full of place, space, and subtle epiphany.
February 1, 2017
‘Mother looked at me appraisingly. ‘Can you kill a hen for me?’
Félix Calvino deserves a much wider audience here in the United States. His first collection of short stories gathered under the title A HATFUL OF CHERRIES were piquant brief morsels that ranged from a few pages to extended stories and every story manages to paint imagery and place and character so clearly with the most economical style that each appears like a flashback of thought in every reader's memory bank.
Calvino was born in Galicia and spent his childhood on a farm not unlike those scenes he so frequently recalls in these stories. Under the reign of General Franco, Calvino fled to England to study and work and eventually migrated to Australia where he currently lives and writes his magical prose. From these various regions Calvino gathers the fodder for his tales - stories that take place in Spain and in Australia with settings that range from dealing with the earth as a child to discovering love as a youth to encountering the realities of small community prejudices to simply celebrating the aspects of the very young to the very aged characters he describes so well.
Calvino's writing style is the opposite of florid. With a few brief sentences on a few pages he is able to bring the reader into the focal point of his stories that usually take a quiet twist at the end, a technique that makes reading a collection of short stories more like reading a full length novel, so engrossed is the reader in his ability to capture attention and imagination. Not that his writing is without color: for instance, in the story ‘They Are Only Dreams’ he writes ‘Mama, I had a dream last night,’ the girl says. ‘It was about a man in bed. He had a white beard. His mouth was open and there was a rattling sound coming from his throat. After he stopped rattling, I heard women crying loudly.’ He knows well how to speak of love, of desire, of tragedy and of humor and is equally at home with each of these and other emotions. The other stories in this collection include ‘The Hen’, ‘What Do You Know About Your Friends?’ ‘The Road’, ‘The Gypsies’, ‘So Much Smoke’, The Smile’, ‘The Sleepwalker’, ‘The Dream Girl’, ‘Kneading the Dough’ and ‘The Valley of Butterflies’.
Some astute publisher should capture the talents of this Spanish Australian writer. He deserves center stage in the arena of authors who have mastered the art of writing short stories as well as his very fine novel ‘Alfonso’. Highly Recommended.
Félix Calvino deserves a much wider audience here in the United States. His first collection of short stories gathered under the title A HATFUL OF CHERRIES were piquant brief morsels that ranged from a few pages to extended stories and every story manages to paint imagery and place and character so clearly with the most economical style that each appears like a flashback of thought in every reader's memory bank.
Calvino was born in Galicia and spent his childhood on a farm not unlike those scenes he so frequently recalls in these stories. Under the reign of General Franco, Calvino fled to England to study and work and eventually migrated to Australia where he currently lives and writes his magical prose. From these various regions Calvino gathers the fodder for his tales - stories that take place in Spain and in Australia with settings that range from dealing with the earth as a child to discovering love as a youth to encountering the realities of small community prejudices to simply celebrating the aspects of the very young to the very aged characters he describes so well.
Calvino's writing style is the opposite of florid. With a few brief sentences on a few pages he is able to bring the reader into the focal point of his stories that usually take a quiet twist at the end, a technique that makes reading a collection of short stories more like reading a full length novel, so engrossed is the reader in his ability to capture attention and imagination. Not that his writing is without color: for instance, in the story ‘They Are Only Dreams’ he writes ‘Mama, I had a dream last night,’ the girl says. ‘It was about a man in bed. He had a white beard. His mouth was open and there was a rattling sound coming from his throat. After he stopped rattling, I heard women crying loudly.’ He knows well how to speak of love, of desire, of tragedy and of humor and is equally at home with each of these and other emotions. The other stories in this collection include ‘The Hen’, ‘What Do You Know About Your Friends?’ ‘The Road’, ‘The Gypsies’, ‘So Much Smoke’, The Smile’, ‘The Sleepwalker’, ‘The Dream Girl’, ‘Kneading the Dough’ and ‘The Valley of Butterflies’.
Some astute publisher should capture the talents of this Spanish Australian writer. He deserves center stage in the arena of authors who have mastered the art of writing short stories as well as his very fine novel ‘Alfonso’. Highly Recommended.
February 5, 2017
So Much Smoke by Felix Calvino (Arcadia Publishing 2016) is another complex collection of short stories by this author who is a master at the short story form. As with his previous works, the stories in So Much Smoke are mostly set some decades past, in his setting of birth in Galicia on the northwest coast of Spain, or otherwise they relate to the migrant experience of Europeans coming to Australia in the sixties and seventies. As I have come to expect, Felix's style is compact and sparse prose, clear and sparkling writing that nevertheless manages to navigate some complex emotional territory. The experiences of village life are particularly well drawn, as are the coming-of-age experiences of various characters in the book, along with the associated vexations about personal identity. The first tale, They Are Only Dreams, is short, sharp and memorable. It remained in my mind, and I have spent a lot more time thinking about it than it took me to read the actual story! The description in these stories is vivid; the endings are abrupt and thought-provoking. This is the stuff of real life, explored with compassion. And there are just enough references to Spanish history and culture to be informative and interesting without being overdone. I'm not sure how much of Felix's work is autobiographical, but I do feel that I know him a little better with each collection I read.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 7 reviews