The current scene is nothing new and utterly different. Independent restaurants have staked out Rose Avenue as their home, and have been part of the community in the way that a franchise outlet or chain cannot, essential to the street’s personality. Longtime local residents were drawn to the neighborhood for the same reason—for the non-franchise experience—and were loyal to the restaurants that shared their point of view. Over time, a community grew up around places that felt like incarnations of the street’s soul. A pervasive live-and-let-live attitude verged on an imperative, as residents and businesses who wanted a broader range of experience accepted the fact that it might not all be easy fun. People experiencing homelessness have settled in Venice for decades, in part because nobody was going to roust them, which was part of the neighborhood ethos. Life went on, and part of it happened in restaurants, where regulars bumped into other regulars, and an unhoused person might pick up a job or a free meal.
It’s not like that anymore. Restaurateurs were on thin ice even before the pandemic, and the smart ones proceeded cautiously. Many didn’t have the time to grab a cheap lease on an empty block and wait for it to catch up, but they also couldn’t afford a more established, high-traffic location. They looked instead for the middle ground, a street with enough potential customers to make economic sense, but not so settled as to be out of their fiscal league. They looked for someplace like Rose Avenue.
Wah! Six slices of bread for breakfast: Sng Mui Hong was unusually hungry. She knew what that meant. The spirit of her father, dead these past 25 years, was with her, and he was starving. Not that Ms Sng could see her father—she never had been able to see ghosts—but she could sense his presence: a heavy weight on her shoulders or a yawning pit in her stomach, hungry for white bread.
She was grateful he had shown up today. Torrential rain had fallen that morning, the drops hitting the zinc roof of her house like a hail of bullets. The open drains slicing through the village had clogged with twigs and leaves, as usual, and Ms Sng had to clear them. She did not thrill at the prospect. At 69 she was not as strong as she used to be, and her knee was giving her trouble. It was not as if the tenants would complain if she left the drains blocked. But clearing them was just what she did, what she had always done. The bread, and her father, would give her strength.
When it came to building big, the Romans clearly knew what they were doing. Nearly 2,000 years after they were constructed, these two enormous and technically astounding structures have withstood earthquakes, floods and military conflicts, long outlasting the empire that spawned them and becoming physical embodiments of the enduring influence of Roman culture across the globe.
This is the season of seeking friends’ faces, retrieving memories, and exchanging kind words, in places drenched in light and joy. It’s the season to celebrate people in train stations enacting scenes of meeting and departure, and to acknowledge our feelings of estrangement at home and away. It’s the season to celebrate the glow of slick sidewalks after rain, the emptiness of deserted roads on winter nights, and the sense of solitude.
Yes, this is the season . . .
Tice Cin’s debut novel, Keeping the House, opens with a dramatis personae, and much of the novel’s wit, precision, and vivid detail is prefigured by that somewhat archaic convention. The lines Cin chooses to sum up her characters are amusingly varied: some receive boring biographical details (ages, professions, sibling relationships), while others are described in terms of their preferences and tendencies. Ayla, who holds on to glamour wherever she can grasp it, “washes up in high heels.” Her mother, who goes searching for the past in her evening meals (literally), is described as “green-fingered.” A long-suffering shopkeeper “always gets pickle juice in his moustache.” One personage, in a wink to the fourth wall, is summarized thus: “Crucial side character.”
An author’s appearance is rarely relevant to a review of his work, but in the case of the Swiss novelist Peter Stamm, a facial feature might provide a clue not just to his new story collection, “It’s Getting Dark,” but to his entire oeuvre.
It is winter but
the poets are still coming.
While sipping coffee in my mother’s Toyota, we hear the birdcall of two teenage boys
in the parking lot: Aiight, one says, Besaydoo, the other returns, as they reach
for each other. Their cupped handshake pops like the first, fat, firecrackers of summer,