Descrizione
It’s Saturday, shortly after midnight, and a thick fog envelops The Narrows, a neighborhood in a small Connecticut town on the banks of the Wye River. Link, a handsome African-American, is on the pier that runs along the river and suddenly comes across Camilo, a young woman being chased by a thief. Link saves her and shortly after, in the soft light of a nearby bar, he discovers that Camilo is a charming white woman, rich and married, who has decided to visit the neighborhood to deceive the boredom of her privileged life. The two begin to meet furtively, violating the rigid social codes and fueling an overwhelming passion: a clandestine relationship between two people who, in the eyes of American society at the time, should never have met. In fact, we are in the early 1950s and The Narrows is inhabited by the African-American community, settled in its wooden and brick houses, among the smoke-filled bars run by the boss Bill Hod: a place populated almost exclusively by blacks, confined in a real “narrow”, which deprives them of a future free from the lack of prospects and conflicts derived from racial hatred. The Narrows also house seventy-year-old Abbie and her adopted son Link, who despite his degree and a past in the navy has decided to work in one of Bill’s clubs. A passionate and painful story, which tells the story of American society of the time, the most mature work of an undeservedly forgotten writer. “The Narrows”, a novel published in 1953 and unpublished until today in Italy, is a precious and important literary rediscovery that the themes covered make incredibly current.
