NOTES FROM A DARK STREET

by Edward Adler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 29, 1961

These are excellent though nightmarish sketches of life among the extremely poor on New York's East Side. For about a page the prose seems overblown,- then- frighteningly- it seems appropriate to the weird, real, furious, lucid scenes it unfolds. This is life among the tenements and gutters in a bubbling, Breughel hell, inhabited by crippled but human beings that think or that talk brilliantly about themselves- people of all tongues and nationalities damned by extreme poverty. A knife grinder's spastic son, riding on a homemade, baby carriage, is hit by a truck; the carriage disintegrates; the father sets the child, freed now by death, on to his grinder and ""teaches"" him the craft he could not learn in life. The one-legged storyteller is ridden in an aerial cab through a foundry, and is trapped into listening to a fantastic monologue on life by the shop's owner. A dollmaker hideously mimics normal life for the sake of his idiot sister. Several of the men, in the wake of an orgy given at a showing of slides of flowers, wind up in a steam bath and witness the death of an old waiter. A child is bitten by a rat and dies, and the neighbors pile all their belongings on the street in mourning. Everything seethes, dissolves; everyone tries to break invisible walls. Yet the book is not ugly and the people are not evil. They all have a volcanic quality, loving, fantastic, gentle, humorous, talkative, and their tremendous energy keeps the book from being merely grotesque. It is violently alive. Still, it will not have a wide audience.

Pub Date: Jan. 29, 1961

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1961

Categories: FICTION