Rafael Alvarez -- Orlo & Leini

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

“A half-century after he found love nibbling pig knuckles down at the end of Clinton Street, Orlo Pound’s ashes lay in a candy tin the scavenger had rescued from the mud room of a Holy Land rowhouse.”

By the end of those thirty-seven words, the first sentence of ‘Down At The End Of Clinton Street’ I was hooked on this collection of stories illustrating the secret love affair of Orlo and Leini.  Their cross-cultural affair, she Greek, he of Anglo-Irish stock, lasts fifty years, survives her forced marriage to the misfortunate George to become, finally an open secret.

Alvarez finds poetry in the everyday, beauty in the mundane, and as much as this charming book is about the instant, deep and permanent love of two people for each other, it is also about his love for his hometown, and that fifty year span allows him to show its changes and its survival too.  How its people have sometimes and somehow interacted across the races and the classes to make their way.