I would in fact recommend this book to any reader for whom a chief pleasure to be found in literature is beautiful sentences. The elegance and incantatory power of Zarin’s prose, along with her virtuosity at observation, are undeniable, but, like many original works, Inverno resists easy description ... The narrator has a riveting, lyrical voice and a deliberately digressive but expertly controlled style ... Love and time. Each is commonly said to have the power to heal, but Inverno is all about that other power they share: to annihilate.
A beautiful, tricky, compressed gem of a book that seems determined to upend your expectations of it ... It carries the grace and intellectual heft of her decades as a poet, where she’s specialized in elegant, fragile, metaphorically rich verse ... This is very much Zarin’s book, marked by a lyricism that turns its deliberate disarray into a kind of poetic logic ... A different, more conventional novel might make Caroline and Alastair’s story less opaque and put their romance in clearer context. But that would make for a less graceful, less universal book ... Also lavish with detail, filled with gorgeous imagery of New York in winter and family gatherings in sultry summers.
A wintry mix of a book, an icy inversion of summer’s inferno. Ms. Zarin’s short, incantatory novel reads like a natural outgrowth of her poetry collections ... Her prose, like her poetry, is restrained and oblique, filled with dreams, literary allusions and rhythmic repetitions ... Trying to impose a clear, linear sequence of events on Inverno is beside the point ... [A] shimmering exploration of time and memory.
Virtually every noun or phrase this author uses reminds her of something else, and she describes those distractions in detail, every single time, whether or not they belong in the book’s narrative ... This is grotesquely self-indulgent on the part of the author, and it shows up right away in the book ... If you’re lucky while laboring through a poetic miasma, you might bark your shin against a random good passage now and again.
An ambitious piece of prose that tangles the past and the present, layering allusions to movies, novels, song lyrics, and fairy tales ... With the poet's eye for detail, Zarin takes an image and turns it over and over, but rather than granting more clarity, these recursive efforts only prove the frailty of memory and the inconstancy of truth. Inverno is a brief but powerful novel, and readers will appreciate the emotional breadth on display in this kaleidoscopic story.
A sly and beguiling love story doubling as a meditation on the nature of time ... This is an ambiguous and often lovely exploration of the limits of love and the unlimited scope of memory and imagination.
Zarin, a poet and essayist, demonstrates little interest in conventional storytelling in her debut novel, which revolves around a couple named Caroline and Alastair and their romantic attachment of 50-plus years, returning frequently to a moment in the middle of that period when Caroline was standing in the snow waiting for him to call, but also pinging back and forth among other apparently important moments ... Somewhere are probably readers who would enjoy this book. May it find them.
