The War Ends at Four

De: Rosanna Staffa

Narrado por: Christine Williams

The War Ends at Four explores the quest of a perpetual outsider looking for a true home while coming to terms with the Italy she left behind and the America she found.

Renata, an Italian acupuncturist in Minneapolis, falls madly in love with a charismatic actor. Once married, she discovers his passion is not focused on her alone. With her marriage and her small acupuncture clinic in crisis, she is called to her father’s deathbed in Milan. There, Renata again faces the slights she suffered in childhood as the daughter of an immigrant from Naples.

Gripped by grief and anxiety over her future, she discovers that her father, a survivor of WWII, believed until the end in risk-taking as a life-affirming necessity. With newfound courage, Renata stumbles into the lure of an old love and the magic of a new one. Her final action surprises even herself.

©2023 Rosanna Staffa (P)2024 Scribd, Inc.

An artfully understated telling of a powerful story

I’m embarrassed to admit that I haven’t read any human-centered fiction in years (but let me know if you’re in the market for sci-fi about the technological and social evolution of a spider society). I couldn’t have asked for a warmer welcome back than “The War Ends At Four.”

It brought all the best elements of storytelling to the fore with masterfully minimal force. The characters were complicated, but perfectly pleasant to spend time with. Their dialogue plumbed great depths using only the things real people would actually say. The story’s emotional stakes were terrifying not because they were epic in scale, but because they were breathtakingly close to experiences any one of us or our loved ones might have. It even managed to give me the sense of looking through another’s eyes without having to leave my own mind behind: a balance as powerful as it is precarious.   

If the author allowed herself any indulgence, it was in the richness of her descriptions of people and places — an allowance even this curmudgeonly reader was happy to grant. I loved how she celebrated the best of Minneapolis’s and Milan’s mundanities: cigarettes, squirrels, shades of lamplight… When it came to descriptions of people, I was first amused, then intrigued, then daunted by how expansively your mom seems to have catalogued human states of mind, how they interact, and how they manifest. Forget knowing how to paint — I didn’t even know there were that many colors.

The next book on my list is about prehistoric ecology; I will soon be back to hard facts and multi-species perspectives. But I’m so pleased with my surprise detour to Minneapolis and Milan, so appreciative of how much I still have to learn humans, and so grateful to Rosanna Staffa for guiding me to places I never could have gotten on my own.