The Years of Smashing Bricks by Richard Katrovas Carnegie Mellon University Press The Years of Smashing Bricks is about sex, drugs and karate in Coronado and San Diego, California, in the early 70s. It’s a memoir in the form of interlocking stories, and reaches back into Richard Katrovas’ odd childhood on the highways of America with criminal parents, and into his teens in Sasebo, Japan, with adoptive parents on a U.S. Navy base. Having earned a second-degree black belt in Sho-bu-kan Okinawa-te in the late 60s, at the height of the mystique of the black belt, Katrovas gave private karate lesson through his twenties in Coronado and San Diego; at the same time, he lived a bohemian life of sex, drugs, art and ideas. At the heart of this utterly unique, lyrical memoir is a young man’s coming to terms with the cultural fictions of masculinity, and with his divided affections for a dying birth mother with whom he has lost contact, and an adoptive mother who is at once noble, deeply decent, and emotionally abusive. “Richard Katrovas has become an indispensable masculine voice, by turns brash and strikingly tender. These short stories form a strong, singular narrative, but they are also individual pieces of beauty and insight. Maybe only a poet can write memoir with this kind of torque.” Patricia Hampl "The Years of Smashing Bricks is pleasantly unpredictable, departing from the formula of the standard memoir. It is strange and haunting, and often very funny. I found its grittiness exhilarating." Tracy Kidder |
