I’ll admit it – I’ve become a Fiorito addict.
It all started when I was browsing the library shelves and a yellowy book caught my eye. With a subtitle like “Love, Madness, Sex and Survival on the Streets of the New Toronto,” how could I resist? The book is by Joe Fiorito – a name you might recognize from the National Post or, more recently, the Toronto Star – and it’s called Union Station. I read it cover to cover in a day, and when I’d finished, I turned back to the first page and read it through again.
It’s a book which celebrates Toronto as a city-in-progress, a city that is great precisely because of its unfinished quality: “Toronto is . . . a bird in flight, a sullen stream in spring time, a mural on a wall that reaches to the horizon; it is . . . well, you get the drift.”
In this city there are immigrants aplenty, running shops of all sorts and bringing their national foods with them. They create home remedies for arthritis, run competitive vacuum cleaner stores, and sometimes, just sometimes, meet the likes of Frank Sinatra. They are determined, modest, independent and creative. They live amongst security guards and thieves, city slickers, and ESL students, those struggling to pay the rent and those with no rent and no home either.
A city of diversity, Toronto’s greatest blessing forms its greatest curse: “Toronto is a city of neighbourhoods. That is supposed to be a saving grace: the neighbourhood as village. But you can live in your neighbourhood all your life and never see the city.” And that’s not the only problem: “It rains in Rosedale and Parkdale alike, but in Rosedale they stay dry.”
Joe Fiorito uses language deftly; his economy of words is remarkable and he integrates interview material seamlessly, letting us hear his cast of Torontonians in their own words. The thrust of the book is a form of patriotism, an attempt to turn the tide against the many Toronto hate campaigns. He wants to show Toronto as a city in which the residents turn out to be just the same sort of people as the readers. It left me glad to be both.
From there I was keen to know more about Fiorito’s own background, so I read The Closer We are to Dying. It’s a memoir about his father, his childhood, and his Italian roots. Both melancholy and uplifting; the language here is more lyrical. Song is a central part of the story: “My father was a bushtown bandstand idol.” Perhaps the sounds of the words are meant to emulate the sweet experience of listening to his father practice during the summer: “his horn turned to honey in the heat.”
The pages are awash with alcohol and roguery, religion and regret, pride and the fraught kind of love that can be felt between father and son. Here Fiorito is straight-talking and honest about his anger; he’s both nostalgic and hopeful.
I was hooked. So I read Comfort Me with Apples, Fiorito’s award-winning collection of food writing. Alongside recipes for chilli dogs, Fiorito explains why he eats his apples right to the core, where he buys his meat, and why he never has red wine with bleu cheese. The columns mix recipes, stories, and memories and are sure to leave you feeling hungry.
By the time I’d finished drooling over the pages, a long weekend was looming. I had planned to take a trip to Montréal, so I continued my Fiorito binge with Tango on the Main. Here, Fiorito has collected some of his best columns for the Montréal Gazette. As in Union Station, we meet a colourful cast – taxi-drivers, street entertainers, sex-line callers.
I was starting to see connections across the books too – he returns again and again to the sight of women greedily eating, his experience of sitting with his dying father in hospital, the pleasure of smelling orange peel, or buying olive oil. I knew from one of the collections that he’s suffered with migraines, so I wasn’t surprised to see them resurface in his only novel, The Song Beneath the Ice.
The Song Beneath the Ice tells the story of a Toronto-based writer who is left with a mystery to solve after his piano-virtuoso best friend disappears. A box of cassette tapes arrive in the mail, and it is only by listening and carefully transcribing that he can begin to understand what has happened. The book is about pain, the cold, and the music and sound of the city. It’s about the way that one subway station is different from another just because of how the sound echoes. It’s also about noodles and sex. It feels less authentic than the columns – as you’d expect from a work of fiction – but it still draws you in with its hypnotic string of sound.
Have I sold you on Fiorito yet? I hope not – next time I feel like re-reading Union Station, I don’t want to find that all of the copies are out of the library.
