Ask the Dust

John Fante 1939

Devastation Rating

Emotionally Ruined
abuse love literary fiction loss

Our Take

Arturo Bandini loves and degrades Camilla Lopez in equal measure, and Fante writes both impulses with such raw honesty that the reader is implicated in every cruelty. The relationship is toxic from the first page, and the dust of the title is what remains when two damaged people grind each other down.

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