Sunny's Nights

Starred review from December 7, 2015
Through this polished, affecting look at remarkable barkeep Sunny Balzano, journalist and editor Sultan recreates a neighborhood in Brooklyn that now seems impossibly distant. After a wrong turn in 1995, Sultan ended up in desolate Red Hook and stumbled across a bar on the one night a week it was open. This first visit to Sunny’s was followed by many others as Sultan fell under the spell of both Balzano, the bar’s owner, and the deserted waterfront. Over a decade, Sultan became Sunny’s part-time barman and Boswell, recording the unique anecdotes and mannerisms of a true bohemian. As Sultan explores Red Hook’s past and present, he depicts his own life against the backdrop of rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn. The genial, boisterous Balzano, a blue-collar Brooklyn native, for his part, had previously been an abstract expressionist painter and had then spent years in an ashram in India, before returning to a family bar and transforming it into a noted destination. In elegant prose, Sultan deploys laconic humor, an instinct for telling details, a taste for eccentricity, and above all, clear-eyed compassion for our all-too-human failings.

November 15, 2015
An insider's look at a sui generis Brooklyn institution. Sultan's account of his tenure as a regular of Sunny's, a storied tavern nestled in the outer-borough wilds of Red Hook, Brooklyn, functions effectively as both a warm celebration of a singular character and his unusual saloon and as an evocative consideration of Red Hook's colorful history and distinctive personality. On the other hand, the narrative often veers perilously close to a recitation of a stranger's crazy nights on the town--the sort of tale that the teller finds endlessly fascinating and hilarious but which the listener endures with a polite, I-guess-you-had-to-be-there smile. Sultan's self-consciously literary prose style--when not slumming in a backwater dive, he hobnobbed with the likes of George Plimpton--exacerbates the general sense of authorial self-indulgence. The arch descriptions of the various eccentrics, bohemians, criminals, and lost souls who populate Sunny's suggest a condescending sort of self-congratulation. The titular Sunny, a charismatic, unlettered, but brilliantly loquacious poet/painter/bartender who conducts his life and business as a series of artistic whims, does vividly emerge as a memorable, fully fleshed-out character. "He could be loyal and libertine, sometimes migrainous in his stubbornness and his foolish addictions," writes the author. "I admire him to no end for being the most original man I have ever met." Sunny's secluded bar, open only on Fridays, home of cheap drinks, impromptu hootenannies, and experimental film screenings, sounds like a uniquely strange and cozy urban refuge. It deserves a remembrance, and Sultan's will serve, but the excessively mandarin tone casts a pall. Readers with further interest in the bar should watch the episode of No Reservations where Anthony Bourdain visits the bar. Sultan has a terrific subject in Sunny and his semilegendary watering hole, but the approach is too cute.

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November 15, 2015
In 1995, Sultan found himself walking into a lonely bar in NYC's notoriously dangerous Red Hook District in Brooklyn. The sign outside, Bar, couldn't have prepared him for what he would find insidea few regulars and a genial, brilliant, much-loved bartender, Antonio Raffaele Sunny Balzano, whose life (slowly revealed to Sultan and, thus, also to the reader) has run the gamut from studying with a guru in India and partying with Andy Warhol to serving in the U.S. Air Force and learning to create abstract paintings. Sultan finds himself helping tend bar but mostly absorbing life lessons from the unflappably kind and wise Sunny ( It takes a lot of time to go from life to art, but if you wait long enough, it'll give birth to poetry ). Sultan waits long enough, eventually quitting his job to work solely for Sunny, who eventually opens for more days during the week, giving Sultan more time to learn and share, in beautifully wrought, evocative prose, all he learns from Sunny. An indelible portrait of an unusual man and a nearly forgotten part of NYC.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)