Between Two Rivers
Nicholas Rinaldi
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2004 HarperCollins
ISBN: 0060578769

Farro Fescu is the proud & observant concierge of Echo Terrace, a condominium in Lower Manhattan just before 9/11.

Within the walls of this world unto itself, work & live a host of people whose lives intertwine around friendship, compassion, love, hate, politics & boredom.

When I lived among the skyscrapers, I would often imagine the lives of those within the glass & cement towers. I even had a friend or two who lived in them who I'd visit, signing in & taking the elevator up into those rarified reaches. There, along the corridors, inside the units high above the teeming streets, life played out in strange & disconnected ways.

Nicholas Rinaldi has caught the flavors, the prisms of craziness, the memories & the despair. Each story is rich in time & struggle. The older folks with histories & culture. The younger ones with bizarre lifestyles & casual protocol. The workers who watch, each with their own lives.

Between Two Rivers is like an Advent Calendar -- you peel away the cover & peek at the complex lives within. The concierge with his memories, his work & his prejudices. The young widow whose tropical rainforest honeymoon had been the apex of her life, whose husband, upon returning to America, had become unfaithful. The beautiful cleaning girl who makes the dangerous mistake of going home too late. The old Luftwaffe POW pilot with nothing now but memories. The gracious & mischievous opera singer. As well as others who work in the World Trade Center & the modern denizen: the rock diva & the clothes designer.

& in the end, suddenly on an enchanting September morning, everyone's life will change as the nearby World Trade Center's Twin Towers are attacked & demolished.

For some reason Helene Hanff kept coming to mind, perhaps because she moved from an old brownstone into a spanking new highrise in her classic 84 Charing Cross Road (one of my all time favorites). If you live in a big city, Between Two Rivers will entrance you. If you don't, then it will give you an idea of who are those people up there in those towers of cement & glass.

Fascinating, if a little heavy!

More from Nicholas Rinaldi: Jukebox Queen Of Malta
(09/12/04)

Rebecca