The Bandini Quartet – John Fante
Posted by the editors on Friday, 1 July 2011
Ask the Dust, by John Fante
image: Wikipedia
The Bandini Quartet (novels) (1938-1985) by John Fante The Bandini Quartet is a collection of four novels by John Fante: Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938), The Road to Los Angeles (1985), Ask the Dust (1939) and Dreams From Bunker Hill (1982), written in a style which may be described as “dirty realism”, and featuring the life and tribulations of first generation Italian-American Arturo Bandini, from young adolescent to disillusioned novelist, short story writer and Hollywood screenwriter. Boisterous, touching, sharp. As The New York Times has written, “Either the work of John Fante is unknown to you or it is unforgettable. He is not the kind of writer to leave room in between.” (Each novel is also available separately)(PR)
David Foster Wallace readers may note that in his 1987 novel The Broom of the System Lavache ‘Stoney’ Beadsman has a wooden leg with a hidden drawer in which he keeps marijuana cigarettes and other illegal substances. Ch. 4 of Ask the Dust refers to a character named Benny Cohen who, “had a wooden leg with a little door in it. Inside the door were marijuana cigarets. He sold them for fifteen cents apiece.”
See our previous posts on David Foster Wallace: The Last Audit – Review of David Foster Wallace’s “The Pale King” by Tom McCarthy, A Self-Help Reader for David Foster Wallace, The Pale King – David Foster Wallace & the Staggering, Multifarious, Cacophonous Predicament, David Foster Wallace – Piecing Together a Posthumous Novel, The Pale King
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