#14 – Dante’s War, by Sandra Sabatini
I wanted to like this novel, I really did. I even tried to like it. Sabatini’s first book, a collection of linked short stories called The One With the News, was this amazingly nuanced examination of emotional complexity in a time of family trauma, and might be one of the best things ever published by The Porcupine’s Quill (ugly cover and all—though really, it wouldn’t be a PQ book be without a cover so ugly it could scare small children). Her second collection, The Dolphins at Sainte-Marie, was equally well-crafted, solidifying Sabatini as a disciple of Alice Munro. I learned several years ago, when Sabatini came to do a reading in Sudbury (not the first time we’d met), that she was planning to write a novel based very loosely on her grandfather’s experiences during the Second World War. Though I have no clue how much of her grandfather’s life remains… Continue Reading