“How many stones do you think it takes to make a person?”
Pietro Grossi’s The Break is a beautiful and deceptively simple little novel—one driven as much by language as by plot—about a quiet, happily married stonemason whose passion is the pocketless Italian form of billiards played with three balls in which the objective is to get one’s opponent to knock down a set of pins in the middle of the table. He is an introspective yet logical fellow who is drawn to the physics and geometry of billiards and the trajectories of its shots.
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