Product Description

Trapped in a small town in 1933, 17-year-old Dominic yearns to fulfil his own dreams of becoming a sports hero. He struggles though, against the wishes of his Italian parents who want him to go into the family business. A story of class and an individual's struggle during hard times in America.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #80075 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
1933 was a Bad Year is one of a number of short, powerful novels that John Fante wrote in the 1930s and 1940s, chronicling young, aspiring men trapped in dire economic circumstances. Dominic Molise, a 17-year-old from a poverty-stricken Italian-American family residing in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains, dreams of becoming a major-league baseball player and, in the process, escaping his philandering father's attempts to lure him into the family bricklaying business. His problems are exacerbated when he becomes hopelessly infatuated with his best friend's icily beautiful elder sister.

Using tough, unsentimental, yet always lyrical, prose Fante beautifully evokes the internal emotional world of an adolescent--the wild fantasising, the nascent sexual feelings and the struggle between the urge to do what is desired and the duty to do what is morally right. But this is more than another coming-of-age tale. There is real spit and fire in Fante's finely judged sentences and a genuine anger at the crippling poverty that flattened so many lives and destroyed so many hopes during the Depression.

Like the novels of Charles Bukowski, who idolised Fante and whose praise helped to bring Fante's work to a wider audience, the writing here is so unerringly honest and the griminess of quotidian life so sharply conveyed that it is impossible not to empathise with these beleaguered characters. This is a short novel, but it displays more truths than most novels several times its length. --Jane Morris

From the Back Cover
'A criminally neglected American writer.' Time Out

'John Fante knew how to make words sing ... he could write sentences that stopped time, deliver descriptions that stank of impossible truths and creat word paintings that deserved to be framed and hung.' Uncut

1933 was a bad year, a cold one, and the year Dominic had do make some decisions about his future. Was he destined for the baseball hall of fame, or was he to be admired locally for his deftness at laying bricks?

Fante depicts the lack of choices and the death of hopes in the eldest son of a poor, brick laying immigrant, with touching compassion. Despite all the belief that Dominic's friends and family have in him, all their support and help, Dominic's own good nature dictates that his dreams will almost certainly be shattered.

John Fante is perhaps best known as the man whose writing inspired Charles Bukowski. His writing was revolutionary in its pared down, apparent simplicity - chronicling the tale of the immigrant, the working underclass and "telling it like it is."

Fante went on to become a successful Hollywood screen writer and lived the supposed LA dream - but he described it as "the most disgusting job in Christ's kingdom."

Customer Reviews

An honest tale of childhood dreams
This is a beautiful, realistic book about a young man growing up with dreams that are confronted with and shattered by the real world. It tells about a period in a man's life in which everything starts to unfold - love, ambition - and yet becomes more complicating. Fante tells all this in a direct and simple way, with enough irony and humour to prevent the book from being depressing. A true American traditional!

The best one-hour read around
He was practically the only writer Bukowski enjoyed; his son has become a powerhouse writer too; and John Fante was responsible for some of the 20th Century's most important novels. Why? Because his writing captures a rare mixture of simplicity, honesty, humour, masculinity and emotion, and were written with all the wonder of a child expressing its first steps in the world.

1933 was a bad year is - in typical Fante style - an emotional book. But it is funny - hilarious.

But you must read this little jewel quickly - an hour to two hours max - to let the humour penetrate fully. You won't be dissappointed, I promise.

Any slower and you will be too caught up in your own wonder at the sheer beauty of Fante's writing. The Italian-American authour is literally that bewildering.

The novel - more of a novella - is about a great character. Teenager, ginger-haired, freckly, tall and spindly, impossibly poor, highly unattractive to women.

But he has the best baseball arm in town. A real beauty that can hurl a ball as fast as a cannonball and twist it and corkscrew it - oh the things he can do with that arm!

That swinger is not only the dream ticket to big league baseball - and its trappings of wealth, fame, and fine female company - it is the key toescaping the invititable entry into his poverty-ridden father's failing bricklaying profession. The horror at bthe thought of it!

Fante easily helps us feel what his main character is feeling. So we dream his dream with him but - equally - in our role as voyeur, fear that he is being set up for a fall.

1933 is the year he decides to follow his dream. And Fante's explosive book sets out five key stages in that year: the dilema, the dream, the doubt, the set-up, and the decision.

And what a gem each stage is. The emotion, honesty and humour crammed into each one makes this my favourite recent read...

Phenomenal, full of life, dreams and reality
This is one of the most alive books, both from an imagery standpoint and a spiritual one (and I don't mean spiritual in a religious way but it can be) that I have read. For a young writer who is trying to write from the heart, this novel is essential. A wonderful story of childhood and its dissipation into adulthood.