How the Mediterranean arrived in Brooklyn

The Mediterranean Runs Through Brooklyn by Anthony Valerio

an e-book available on Amazon

In spite of his university education, Valerio writes like a real person sitting there telling you what happened. Maybe he’s making some of it up, but so what?

He isn’t rigid about anything. All his stories start with what’s announced in the contents. But all his stories, with little warning, go galloping off in all directions. Those are the circles, Italian circles, because they always come back again. He’s not afraid of anything. He’s not intent on sounding like a university person who wants to write a brilliant novel, just like his professors taught him to do, just like most of those classics do. You’re never given the feeling that he consulted a dictionary, a thesaurus, and God knows what all else. He just goes ahead and writes a brilliant novel. Or are they brilliant stories? Maybe brilliant poetry? Well, it’s brilliant stuff, anyway. And it’s the brilliant part that’s important.

Everything is floating around like real life; you don’t have to read the pieces in order. Things don’t always go together but they always fit together. It’s a mystery that I want to explore even if I don’t understand it. It’s like real life—you just keep rolling it around in your head whether you understand it or not and the thoughts feel good in your mind.

It’s easy to find something to say, like being at a party and everybody’s stoned, so whatever you say makes sense, even if it doesn’t. It’s like you dive into the book and take a tour of Valerio’s family, which would be just like a tour of your own family, like wandering around in a museum with great stuff all over the place. Valerio’s family is fascinating and you want to be a part of it, no matter what they do, and before you’re even half way through the book you know you’re going to want to read the book again because you know you’re going to miss these people when you’re finished the book.

It even echoes stuff from his other work and repeats stuff in this book and it all circles around you until you feel like a constellation right in the middle of Brooklyn.

Valerio has a great talent for description using a few simple words. He knows that little words say a hell of a lot more than big words. “On my first day home after being born, I stopped in at Mary’s and peed on her lap.” His first day of school: “By the time I was torn from the banister leading to my mother and father, it was eight-fifteen.” “Valentino’s penis was likely uncircumcised, but there is no evidence he ever used it.” “While Mr. Bernstein was reading my story, I looked around the cafeteria and felt that it was a sacred place reserved for writers and editors of the first rank. Mr. Bernstein was editor-in-chief of a line of soft-core pornographic books. After he read my story, he offered me a job answering the telephone.”

There’s a touching story about his father and how he died. But it’s not told touchingly; there are hardly any emotional words. The words he uses are almost cold, straight-forward, no-nonsense, and matter-of-fact, which is how it touches you. When words go straight from the author’s pen to your heart, they’re not watered down the way words are when they go from the author’s pen and pass through the author’s heart before going to the reader’s.

The story I can relate to the most, as a writer and the proud owner of an HB pencil, is “Lament of the Cheap Pentel Pencil.” He searches for a new Number 2 pencil, the best, and the cheapest, that Pentel makes, all meanderings included in the price. One meandering describes how he first learned about masturbation. It starts like this: “One day while my friend Albee and I were writing on the street, he told me about a wonderful discovery he had just made.”—in case you want to search for it and read it first.

It comes pretty much in the middle of the book but, as I said, you don’t have to read this book in order. You just have to read this book.

Damn, you just have to read this book.