Fefè - by James Abruzzo (Paperback)

About the Book

Alfredo constructs order-Sicilian discipline, a brilliant wife, a world of patronage-while searching for a centrality that keeps receding. A quieter exile: not from place, but from self.

Book Synopsis

Fefè arrives in America with Sicily still inside him: the sea, the family traditions, the taste of fennel, fish, and bread. He meets Lena - brilliant, American, powerful, a woman at the center of her family relationships. Their marriage carries Alfredo from the Upper West Side to the Berkshires, from Sicily to London, through concerts, meals, friendships, rivalries, and the intimate politics of family.

Fefè is a novel of travel and return: Sicily with its heat and memory, London with its fog and traditions, the Upper West Side with its liberal ideas and rituals, and the Berkshires with its summer festivals. It is also a sensual novel - of meals remembered, shared, and withheld. Food becomes language. Music becomes memory. Love becomes something harder to define.

Woven through the book is a soundtrack the reader can listen to as they read: classical piano as the emotional accompaniment of Alfredo's life. The music does not decorate; it carries the story.

At sixty, Alfredo finds himself drawn toward a younger Polish artist whose presence unsettles the life he has so carefully built. Over the years that follow, his marriage, his daughter, his past, and even Sicily itself begin to change shape. What once felt like inheritance becomes mystery. What once felt secure begins to recede.

Fefè is the story of a man who has commanded the room his entire life and must finally ask what it has cost him. It is a novel of family, food, music, and desire - and the strange way a life can belong to many places and still leave a person searching for home.

Review Quotes

"Abruzzo cleverly evokes this passion while, over time, also the suffering that comes from such a focus at the expense of all else. This is a book I highly recommend."

-Dr. Harvey Auerbach

"Abruzzo has written a novel where the music uplifts you, the food nourishes you, and the people feel so alive you find yourself wondering where they go when you close the book."

- T. Calister

"The characters in the book are rich and real and their relationships feel believable - the sense of time and the passage of the complications of life through several generations."

- Nancy Cohen