More than anything else, I am happy to report that this is the second book that I have finished in four and a half days. I don't want to jinx myself or anything, but it may very well be that after a l-o-o-o-n-g bout of inability to read brought about by chemo brain... maybe the fog is lifting. I plowed through FIND ME, and I read THE SHIPPING NEWS in just a day and a half. This is exciting. This feels like... well, the old me.
I first read THE SHIPPING NEWS when it won the Pulitzer back in 1993. The nine-year-later re-read felt fresh and new. I remembered so little. I remembered the sad-sack Quoyle relocating his family to the old family home in Newfoundland. I remembered his job writing the shipping news at the Gunny Bird. I remembered the aunt, vaguely. And the two troublesome daughters. But mostly I remembered the house.
I'd forgotten how bleak the book is. I re-read it to prepare for my own summer adventures in Newfoundland, and now I am beset with worries about blood-draining black flies and roads that lead nowhere. I'd forgotten that while Quoyle is a champ of a father, he's struggles just to be a man. I'd forgotten how untamed the book made Newfoundland feel-- a place of reckless drunks, incestuous families, and small-minded folk.
I didn't forget that I loved the book when I first read it. And I am no less enchanted by it now. It's so spare. So echoes the close, sparse journalism that Quoyle writes. I am charmed by the space that the book dedicates to rumor and lore. The fact that Proulx allows characters to meander through stories and legends, that she devotes pages upon pages to stuff that only casts character onto the place and doesn't necessarily advance the story.
I've not read anything else by Proulx, but now, knowing she lives part time in Newfoundland, I will seek more out.
Showing posts with label literary fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literary fiction. Show all posts
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Friday, February 6, 2009
THE UNNATURAL HISTORY OF CYPRESS PARISH by Elise Blackwell
For obvious reasons, I am both drawn to and repelled by novels about hurricanes, especially those about Katrina. I could barely get through chapter one of James Lee Burke's TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN. I first cracked the spine while sneaking a cigarette break during lunch while teaching on the campus of Skidmore College a couple of summers ago. And my response to the first few pages was bodily, visceral, and dramatic. Self-preservation made me close the book before I got through more than two or three pages; I knew if I kept reading, I wouldn't be able to go back to my class full of fourteen and fifteen year olds and roll onward with Hamlet.
And my response late last year to CATEGORY FIVE by TJ McGregor was: "This book was published in 2005, before Hurricane Katrina, and it is so prescient that at times it made this Katrina survivor's knees get weak."
But with UNNATURAL HISTORY, here we have a book explicitly dealing with Katrina, and... nothing. Really.
My first reaction to this book was to think that the Katrina sections felt forced. They are the "present day" of the book during which the protagonist, Louis, waits for Katrina to hit and reflects upon the 1927 Mississippi River flood/levee blasting, the locus of the main plot of the novel. The Katrina sections bookend the 1927 plotline; like in the recent movie, Benjamin Buttons, these moments felt like an afterthought-- dry and emotionless (clearly F.Scott Fitzgerald did not address a coming hurricane in his short story from which Buttons takes its inspiration). Anyone who lived in any proximity to the Katrina landfall knows that those moments before the storm struck were anything but emotionless.
My instincts may have been right about these sections. According to a review from the Washington Post: "When Katrina struck Louisiana in 2005, Elise Blackwell was deep into a novel about the flood that struck Louisiana in 1927. 'This still spooks me,' she says, and that uncanny repetition of disaster forced her to revise what she'd written."
(nb. I am not criticizing the idea of revising a work in process to reflect a current event; I tried to include Katrina in the work that I had in progress-- it's a slog, and I don't know if it will work. But you have to be honest to the event, give it some time to shift around and find its proper level. Note that the uberprolific Dean Koontz has taken more than four years to produce the third in his series of modern Frankenstein novels, set in New Orleans. His delay was said to be because he didn't want to unleash any more destruction on New Orleans-- even fictional destruction. But it also took him time to figure out how to handle Katrina. My sense is that Blackwell didn't take enough of that time.)
In 1927, Louis lives in the fictional Cypress Parish, the son of the lumber town's Superintendent-- the most important man in town. As he grows up and watches town politics and the relationships between his father and officials on both a local and a statewide level, Louis begins to understand that his dad is just a small fish. There are other ponds too, as there always have been in renegade rural Louisiana, organized (and disorganized) crime and labor. It's not until Louis gets a job working as a driver for one of those shady characters that he begins to see all these layers of government (I use that term loosely) and how they work.
There's a love story. A lovely story about a local painter. Some Southern Gothic over-the-top tall-tales. But none of those really resonanted with me. My favorite parts of the book were those that described the local flora and fauna and other threats (leprosy!) and were meant to mimic the tone of a Natural History book. Louis, you see, is fond of Pliny.
All-in-all, this book felt flat, emotionless, stagnant. It all felt like Pliny. Not a book about a coming flood, but a book where the waters felt still, indeed.
And my response late last year to CATEGORY FIVE by TJ McGregor was: "This book was published in 2005, before Hurricane Katrina, and it is so prescient that at times it made this Katrina survivor's knees get weak."
But with UNNATURAL HISTORY, here we have a book explicitly dealing with Katrina, and... nothing. Really.
My first reaction to this book was to think that the Katrina sections felt forced. They are the "present day" of the book during which the protagonist, Louis, waits for Katrina to hit and reflects upon the 1927 Mississippi River flood/levee blasting, the locus of the main plot of the novel. The Katrina sections bookend the 1927 plotline; like in the recent movie, Benjamin Buttons, these moments felt like an afterthought-- dry and emotionless (clearly F.Scott Fitzgerald did not address a coming hurricane in his short story from which Buttons takes its inspiration). Anyone who lived in any proximity to the Katrina landfall knows that those moments before the storm struck were anything but emotionless.
My instincts may have been right about these sections. According to a review from the Washington Post: "When Katrina struck Louisiana in 2005, Elise Blackwell was deep into a novel about the flood that struck Louisiana in 1927. 'This still spooks me,' she says, and that uncanny repetition of disaster forced her to revise what she'd written."
(nb. I am not criticizing the idea of revising a work in process to reflect a current event; I tried to include Katrina in the work that I had in progress-- it's a slog, and I don't know if it will work. But you have to be honest to the event, give it some time to shift around and find its proper level. Note that the uberprolific Dean Koontz has taken more than four years to produce the third in his series of modern Frankenstein novels, set in New Orleans. His delay was said to be because he didn't want to unleash any more destruction on New Orleans-- even fictional destruction. But it also took him time to figure out how to handle Katrina. My sense is that Blackwell didn't take enough of that time.)
In 1927, Louis lives in the fictional Cypress Parish, the son of the lumber town's Superintendent-- the most important man in town. As he grows up and watches town politics and the relationships between his father and officials on both a local and a statewide level, Louis begins to understand that his dad is just a small fish. There are other ponds too, as there always have been in renegade rural Louisiana, organized (and disorganized) crime and labor. It's not until Louis gets a job working as a driver for one of those shady characters that he begins to see all these layers of government (I use that term loosely) and how they work.
There's a love story. A lovely story about a local painter. Some Southern Gothic over-the-top tall-tales. But none of those really resonanted with me. My favorite parts of the book were those that described the local flora and fauna and other threats (leprosy!) and were meant to mimic the tone of a Natural History book. Louis, you see, is fond of Pliny.
All-in-all, this book felt flat, emotionless, stagnant. It all felt like Pliny. Not a book about a coming flood, but a book where the waters felt still, indeed.
Friday, January 23, 2009
MOTEL OF THE STARS by Karen McElmurray
Jason Sanderson is a very sad man. He has a sad job (repo man). His family life is sad-- first wife and only child are both dead. His current home life is sad-- he's married to a woman who neither understands him (keeps dragging him to new age-y couples groups) nor his loss (stages a horribly gauche and insensitive sort of grief intervention on the 10th anniversary of the death of the son-- perhaps the most brilliantly written and upsetting scene in the book).
Lory Llewellyn is a very sad woman. She has a sad job (accountant for her skeezy step dad's eponymous hotel). Her family life is sad-- mom ran away and stepdad is, as I said, skeezy, and an alcoholic. Her current home life is sad-- almost ten years ago her lover died in a helicopter crash and she's never recovered. She's a cutter. She's reclusive.
The parallel stories of these two depressed and depressing folk who share their love and loss of Sam Sanderson, Jason's son and Lory's lover, run in elegant and poetic prose until they converge (perhaps inevitably, but somehow the convenience is tempered by how poetic the whole book is). Infused with and often critical of both quack spirituality and the "real" deal, MOTEL OF THE MYSTERIES is an exploration of grief, of family, of dependancy.
This is a sad book. It will make you hurt. But the writing is so extraordinarily good that you'll enjoy that pain.
This is McElmurray's second novel. The first, STRANGE BIRDS IN THE TREE OF HEAVEN, was also a gorgeously crafted book, but it was a little harder to follow, a little more abstract. MOTEL has been very well received. One blogger named it her novel of the year.
McElmurray was born and raised in Kentucky. Her book is published by the local Sarabande Books as part of the Linda Bruckheimer (who I keep confusing with Linda Wurthhiemer) Series in KY Literature (click here) -- which I'd never heard of until I came across this book.
And she's reading tonight (with Sean Hill and Elizabeth Bradfield) at 7:30pm at the Frankfort Avenue Carmichael's. Check it out and pick up the book.
Lory Llewellyn is a very sad woman. She has a sad job (accountant for her skeezy step dad's eponymous hotel). Her family life is sad-- mom ran away and stepdad is, as I said, skeezy, and an alcoholic. Her current home life is sad-- almost ten years ago her lover died in a helicopter crash and she's never recovered. She's a cutter. She's reclusive.
The parallel stories of these two depressed and depressing folk who share their love and loss of Sam Sanderson, Jason's son and Lory's lover, run in elegant and poetic prose until they converge (perhaps inevitably, but somehow the convenience is tempered by how poetic the whole book is). Infused with and often critical of both quack spirituality and the "real" deal, MOTEL OF THE MYSTERIES is an exploration of grief, of family, of dependancy.
This is a sad book. It will make you hurt. But the writing is so extraordinarily good that you'll enjoy that pain.
This is McElmurray's second novel. The first, STRANGE BIRDS IN THE TREE OF HEAVEN, was also a gorgeously crafted book, but it was a little harder to follow, a little more abstract. MOTEL has been very well received. One blogger named it her novel of the year.
McElmurray was born and raised in Kentucky. Her book is published by the local Sarabande Books as part of the Linda Bruckheimer (who I keep confusing with Linda Wurthhiemer) Series in KY Literature (click here) -- which I'd never heard of until I came across this book.
And she's reading tonight (with Sean Hill and Elizabeth Bradfield) at 7:30pm at the Frankfort Avenue Carmichael's. Check it out and pick up the book.
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