Inverno is a love story that stretches across decades. Inverno is also the story of Caroline, waiting in Central Park in a snowstorm for her phone to ring, yards from where, thirty years ago, Alastair, as a boy, hid in the trees. Will he call? Won't he? The story moves the way the mind does: years flash by in an instant--now we are in the perilous world of fairy tale, now stranded anew in childhood, with its sorrows and harsh words. Ever-present are the complicated negotiations of the heart.
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.
