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Rating: The footprints, thick and deep, that confuse the snow of this filthy driveway of a filthy house, are those of Svevo Bandini. He left them with his shoes resoled with the cardboard from a pasta box. If you look around, Bandini is waiting for the spring in the chicken coop, distracting himself with trivial household chores. Colorado is not a good place for an Abruzzese bricklayer. In winter, with the snow, you build nothing. With the snow, you wait for spring. The one at the stove, part nun, part tigress, intent on preparing breakfast, is Maria Bandini. She wears a dress that skillfully hides the dirt, sewn back together to appear fashionable. The sweater hanging on the wall belongs to Arturo Bandini. He is fourteen years old and is in love with a girl who knows nothing of this love and who, in any case, hates him. But one day, when Arturo has broken all of Joe DiMaggio's records, when he is the new pride of Italian Americans, when he is the pitcher for the Chicago Cubs, Rosa will surrender to his love, to his heart, and to Arturo's genius. For the moment, nothing doing: Arturo sleeps in the bed with his two brothers, will be late for school, and after the daily scolding from Sister Cletus - the one with the glass eye that occasionally goes crazy - he will be mocked by his classmates and by Rosa herself, who will consider him, once again, a mere loser. But one day, with the arrival of spring, he will be the pitcher for the Cubs and things will take an interesting turn.
The letter lying on the table is from Donna Toscana, Maria's mother. She informs her daughter that on Sunday she will be at her house for a visit, in that horrible house to which Svevo, with his uselessness, has relegated her. This is Donna Toscana's opinion. Here's how it will go: Svevo will disappear for two days just to avoid the old woman; he will get drunk like an animal just to not think that this harpy is in his house, with her butt sitting on one of his chairs. He will get drunk together with that other Abruzzese bricklayer... the one with the forbidden name, who loves fashionable clothes and women.
They carry on, twisted in credit and in the skill to always ask for it without being denied - a talent unique to the Bandini family -; tied to this miserable winter and to this yearned-for spring that delays its arrival. The story is always the same, with its tangents interrupting its regularity... a rich woman; the death of a little girl; a hundred dollars swindled; a chicken killed by a stone; some punches; Italian pride and poverty which sometimes rhyme with dignity.
John Fante, for his second complete novel, after the unpublishable The Road to Los Angeles, forgoes the first person in favor of a present tense third person, but light, that sometimes slips into Svevo and sometimes into Arturo. The two men of the house, different but close, are the incentives, the demiurges of the story with their tension towards the future, with the desire for redemption or at least for serenity.
As Fante himself, now dying, dictated to his wife Joyce: <<Some nights, in bed, a sentence, a paragraph or a character from this first work hypnotizes me... of one thing I'm sure: all the people from my life as a writer, all my characters are found in this first work of mine. Of me, there is nothing left, only the memory of old bedrooms, and my mother shuffling towards the kitchen.>>
John Fante - Wait Until Spring, Bandini. 1938
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