Years ago I saw the movie, Charly, with Cliff Robertson. I thought, having seen the movie, that there was really no reason to read the book. I was wroYears ago I saw the movie, Charly, with Cliff Robertson. I thought, having seen the movie, that there was really no reason to read the book. I was wrong. What a poignant, sad and moving tale this is, told from the point of view of Charlie Gordon, who goes from retardation to genius and experiences the world from two completely different human conditions. That it is written in Charlie’s own words is inspired. As Charlie begins to understand things about his life and recover his memories, there is a kind of sadness that goes with the knowledge that is bittersweet.
I could not help thinking about the story in the news last week that Down’s Syndrome has been almost eradicated in Iceland through the use of abortion. I wondered if this book didn’t speak volumes about the dangers of wanting everyone to be perfect and how much we might be missing when we discount the value of those who have disabilities, physical or mental.
I am sorry I waited so long to read this, but I treasure the experience. This one will go right into my favorites folder.
Special thanks to Candi, who pushed me to read this wonderful book. ...more
A wonderfully powerful play about the importance of the individual in a democratic society. We are taken into the jury room, where eleven men have alrA wonderfully powerful play about the importance of the individual in a democratic society. We are taken into the jury room, where eleven men have already made up their minds to convict a sixteen year old boy of murdering his father and sentence him to the electric chair. But one man, Juror #8, wants to be sure. He wants to weigh the facts and examine the evidence and remove all doubt from his own mind as to the guilt of this boy, and in doing so, he changes the course of the case and reveals a great deal about the members of this panel.
It’s very hard to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this. And no matter where you run into it, prejudice obscures the truth.
All of us wants Juror #8 to be sitting on our jury if we are accused of a crime, so each of us should try to be Juror #8 if we are ever in a position of such authority over another person. The good old golden rule.
BTW, the movie with Henry Fonda and a cast of other well-known actors is excellent and follows the play almost word-for-word. ...more
This book might be as close as you will ever come to knowing what it was like to leave Independence, Missouri in 1836 and make your way by wagon alongThis book might be as close as you will ever come to knowing what it was like to leave Independence, Missouri in 1836 and make your way by wagon along the Oregon Trail to the wilderness that was Oregon. Lije Evans, his wife Rebecca, and his son Brownie are one of a group of families who sign on with a wagon train to make the journey, and they represent, in my eyes, the perfect depiction of the kind of strong individuals who carved out this new land into civilization. During the journey, Lije discovers himself as a leader and we discover that a good man can be a strong man; that a quiet man can make all the noise that is needed.
There is one more member of the Evans family that I have not mentioned, but for whom I developed a great attachment, the dog, Rock. At the outset of the story, there is a move to kill all the dogs, many thinking they would be a nuisance on such a long trip. Evans figured he would have some business with the man who came to shoot Rock. That was the moment I knew I was going to love Lije, no going back.
My favorite character, by far, however, was Dick Summers. A seasoned mountain man who has been farming in Missouri, he signs on to pilot the group as far as the Dalles. I recognized right away that without men like Dick, none of the others would have ever survived to do the settling. In fact, they would hardly have known how to get where they were going. What I loved the most about him, however, was his open mind; never thinking the world should be like him or give him any particular homage.
He didn’t blame the Oregoners as he had known old mountain men to do. Everybody had his life to make, and every time its way, one different from another. The fur hunter didn’t have title to the mountain no matter if he did say finders keepers. By that system the country belonged to the Indians, or maybe someone before them or someone before them. No use to stand against the stream of change and time.
I felt I got to know Dick Summers in a way that I could strangely relate to. Of course, his lost youth was danger and mountains and the capability to survive, but wasn’t he longing for what most of us older people long for?
At the nub of it did he just want his youth back? Beaver, streams, squaws, danger--were they just names for his young time?
When I went back to review the passages I had marked while reading, almost all of them were Dick. His was the voice that spoke to me.
Guthrie shows us the physical hardships of the journey, which would surely be enough to defeat most of us, but which we could all fairly well imagine; but he also shows us the emotional toll that such a choice entails. Makes you wonder how anyone ever had the courage to set out, particularly with children in tow. The thought of the women, visibly pregnant, prodding the oxen while walking the trail, wore me to a bone. Guthrie’s men are both strong and weak, as are the women, and he seems to know both sexes well...what makes them the same and what makes them different, and how much both were needed to make such an undertaking work at all.
She wondered if he felt the same as she did. Did any two people ever feel the same? Did ever one soul know another, though they talked at night, though sometimes in hunger and in isolation they sought to make their bodies one, the all-mother in her loneliness trying to take back home the lost child-man?
I could picture these people, a mix of quite different backgrounds and incomes, growing closer and more understanding or more leery and wiser as the migration became a way of life. I could feel how tired and weary they felt at the end of even a good day. I could see the young faces becoming withered and crusted by exposure to wind and sun, and the older faces becoming hardened and set. At the same time, I could feel the yearning they all shared to start a new life, find a new adventure, see something they had never seen before. If they were still heading trains West, and if I were thirty years younger, I could see myself being convinced by Guthrie that the travails would be worth it; that Oregon could be home, and that a sturdy wagon and a good man might be all you would need. ...more
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story, set in pre-revolutionary America, is one of a country lad, named Robin, who comes to town to seek his fortune by way of hNathaniel Hawthorne’s story, set in pre-revolutionary America, is one of a country lad, named Robin, who comes to town to seek his fortune by way of his connection with a distant kinsman, Major Molineux. In this clever tale, in which Robin seeks to locate the home of the Major, the lad is exposed to the vices and threats that a town represents to a naive country boy. Confronted by greed, prostitution, pride and unnamed evil, Robin finds himself unable to understand what is occurring about him and his inability to locate his kinsman.
Contrasting both innocence and worldliness, good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, and the value of independence over dependence, Hawthorne sets the stage for an ending that surprises both Robin and the reader. The story is highly symbolic and complex, with layers of meaning that encompass both the coming-of-age maturation of a single character in Robin and the maturation of a nation in the fledgling USA.
I remember studying this story when in high school and find it holds up marvelously after so many years.
Nothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing--desiNothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing--desire. And before it, when it is big, all is little.
Have you ever thought about true artists, like Vincent Van Gogh, who pay such a high price for their art? Men and women who have devoted half of their waking hours to the practice and perfection of their musical talents so that they can perform in an opera or become a concert pianist? Too often we think of this kind of achievement as innate talent, and of course some of it must be, but there are many talented and gifted people who never reach that level because they cannot or will not scale the wall.
In many ways, that is what this novel is about. Thea is a natural talent, and many around her recognize her abilities, but she cannot just step into the world she wants without a lot of sacrifice and loss. We trade things, always, to reach our dreams. I’m not sure Cather questions whether what Thea loses is worth the sacrifice, I think Cather thought it was, in fact, I think Cather thought of herself as being in Thea’s shoes, but I thought about whether it was worth it, and I would have said “no�.
I loved the first half of this novel, the part where Thea was a girl and trying to identify her talent and the thing that spurred her forward. I liked the quirky characters of Moonstone, the people of the country, Ray Johnson, the railroad worker who loves her from afar; Dr. Archie, who sees her as something too fine for the world she occupies; Professor Wunsch, her drunken piano teacher who discovers her talent and nurtures it; and Spanish Johnny, a Mexican musician who shares the music of the soul.
Cather is in her usual form with her writing. She can describe a scene and make you step into it.
Winter was long in coming that year. Throughout October the days were bathed in sunlight and the air was clear as crystal. The town kept its cheerful summer aspect, the desert glistened with light, the sand hills every day went through magical changes of color. The scarlet sage bloomed late in the front yards, the cottonwood leaves were bright gold long before they fell, and it was not until November that the green on the tamarisks began to cloud and fade. There was a flurry of snow about Thanksgiving, and then December came on warm and clear.
These were wonderful aspects of the book, but the second half let me down in some way that is hard to describe. I began to see Thea as rather selfish and self-centered. Although I don’t believe Cather meant her to be seen in this way, I saw her as using her friends and admirers as stepping-stones. She maintained friendships with them, and they all seemed happy to serve her as a talent fully beyond their reach, but it seemed she somehow felt entitled to anything they laid on her altar and owed them nothing in return. No doubt it was the extraordinary talent we were meant to see being worshiped, but I kept seeing Hollywood and someone who believed the talent itself made her “more� than others. I found her cold, and I wondered if she hadn’t lost that little girl somewhere along the way, even though Cather kept telling me she had not.
Finally, there is, at the heart of this book, a desire to make the reader understand and value art itself. Cather explains this to us again and again, almost too often, but I do think she nailed it here:
What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself,--life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?
For the most part, this book worked for me, but it was not quite as satisfying as My Ántonia. It landed at 3.5 stars, but after some deliberation, I am rounding down. ...more
Hard, hard, hard. That was the only way to be--so hard that nothing, the street, the house, the people--nothing would ever be able to touch her.
SoHard, hard, hard. That was the only way to be--so hard that nothing, the street, the house, the people--nothing would ever be able to touch her.
Some books just make you want to scream with indignation, and Ann Petry’s The Street is one of them. I knew what to expect from this novel. Written in 1946 at the height of Jim Crow and before the passing of the Civil Rights Act, there was little hope that this would be anything but a distressing chronicle of life for the blacks sentenced to living on the poverty-stricken streets of Harlem. I knew what to expect, but that did not lessen the anguish I felt while reading it.
When we meet Lutie Johnson, she is a single parent, with hopes and aspirations that reach beyond the struggling reality of her life with her eight year old son, Bub. She is beautiful and shapely and much desired by the men around her; a ruthless bunch, but many of whom would have also desired another life had they been given any choice. Bub is young and innocent and just on the verge of being introduced to the cruelties of the world he inhabits.
It must be hate that made them wrap all Negroes up in a neat package labeled ‘colored�, a package that called for certain kinds of jobs, and a special kind of treatment. But she really didn’t know what it was.
If you looked at them from inside the framework of a fat weekly salary, and you thought of colored people as naturally criminal, then you didn’t really see what any Negro looked like. You couldn’t, because the Negro was never an individual. He was a threat, or an animal, or a curse, or a blight, or a joke.
Petry’s observations are brutal and so hard to read about, all the more so because they ring so true. I could barely comprehend the depth of the despair and hopelessness for these people. I have seen poverty, up-close and personal, but this is more than poverty, it is squallor imposed from without. You cannot help praying that Lutie and Bub will be the exceptions and find the magic door that leads to escape; you cannot help wondering if anyone will be listening to the prayer.
Bub, for me, was the central character of this story, because he represented for me all that Lutie had to hope for, all she had to lose, and, sadly, what every one of these beleaguered men once were-- malleable boys, sweet boys, children thrown away.
This book is not perfect. I could easily point out defects if I made an effort to do so, but I think this is an important book that rises above any flaws. It is so honest--a kind of miracle when you consider how ill-received it might have been in its time, for shining a light on such a deplorable practice of this society. It is a debut effort, to boot. It was the first book written by a black woman to sell over a million copies. That told me that it hit a chord with a lot of people who were either embroiled in this life or witness to it. It saddens me that it has fallen into obscurity; with only 7,160 ratings on ŷ.
For today’s reader, I would hope that it both highlights the ways in which things that should have changed have not, but also how much progress we have made toward a goal that we might someday actually reach if we continue to work at it. A girl like Lutie Johnson might still be lost in our society, despite all her efforts, but she might also achieve all the dreams that she has, a feat virtually impossible, indeed literally prohibited, in her time....more
First of all, my rating is for the poems themselves and not for this edition. It was very poorly done and I used it primarily as a guide for a group rFirst of all, my rating is for the poems themselves and not for this edition. It was very poorly done and I used it primarily as a guide for a group read, while finding the poems otherwise for actually reading. I would urge anyone who wishes to read Dickinson to seek out a much better edition than this one.
Not every poem in this collection is one of Dickinson’s best, but each of them has something important to say to us, if we are open and listen.
Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, is among my favorites. The idea of hope as a bird that sings endlessly in the soul and never asks for a crumb in return is so visual and so appealing.
There’s a certain slant of light, On winter afternoons, That oppresses, like the weight Of cathedral tunes.
This put me in mind of this painting by Monet, The Magpie, and the beauty of afternoon light on a snowy but desolate winter’s day. [image]
Marvelous imagery of a beautiful sunset, which could be appreciated at only that level, but there is the deeper meaning of the passage of a life and reaching the other side, with Christ as the shepherd there to lead “the flock away.�
I'll tell you how the Sun rose - A Ribbon at a time - The Steeples swam in Amethyst - The news like Squirrels, ran - The Hills untied their Bonnets - The Bobolinks - begun - Then I said softly to myself - "That must have been the Sun"! But how he set - I know not - There seemed a purple stile That little Yellow boys and girls Were climbing all the while - Till when they reached the other side, A Dominie in Gray - Put gently up the evening Bars - And led the flock away -
What makes her poetry so special is the way she tackles subjects that are familiar to every one of us, regardless of age or station in life. I also believe she has hit upon a basic truth, it takes much more than time to heal a true hurt.
They say that ‘time assuages,�-- Time never did assuage; An actual suffering strengthens, As sinews do, with age.
Time is a test of trouble, But not a remedy, If such it prove, it prove too There was no malady.
Another long-time favorite. I have it on a sampler that I bought some forty years ago and have carried with me from home to home.
I never saw a moor, I never saw the sea; Yet know I how the heather looks, And what a wave must be.
I never spoke with God, Nor visited in heaven; Yet certain am I of the spot As if the chart were given.
One more from this collection, because I thought of the day after my Mother was gone; the stillness in her room and the hushed buzz of voices in the kitchen.
The bustle in a house The morning after death Is solemnest of industries Enacted upon earth,--
The sweeping up the heart, And putting love away We shall not want to use again Until eternity.
I have read Emily Dickinson many times, but one cannot visit these poems too many times. They are as full and rich as many more complex and complicated verses. They are magic for their imagery, which brings to life the mind of this remarkable woman....more
I know why I loved this as a kid. It is a raw adventure, with a natural charm, and the idea of a wild wolf-dog that is tamed by one man’s kindness wouI know why I loved this as a kid. It is a raw adventure, with a natural charm, and the idea of a wild wolf-dog that is tamed by one man’s kindness would have been irresistible to my nine year old self. Even as an adult, it reads like a heroic tale, as White Fang fights his way through life’s difficulties, like Odysseus trying to find his way home. There can be little doubt that Jack London understood the nature of a wild animal and the dangerous life in the Northern climes.
The descriptive powers of London made me shiver with the chill of the cold and the fear that must accompany a night spent with a fire being the only thing standing between a man and a hungry wolf pack. There are moments of animal cruelty and even nature’s cruelty that make one cringe, but the story is true to life, and life is often unkind. But there is also a feeling of hope, of the possibility of survival, and of the love that a dog, or even a wolf, can offer a man, whether he deserves it or not. ...more
I have long meant to read this novel, and it is sad that the thing that finally got me to it was the death of the author. We lost Charles Portis on FeI have long meant to read this novel, and it is sad that the thing that finally got me to it was the death of the author. We lost Charles Portis on February 17, 2020. Sadder even than his death was knowing that he had suffered from Alzheimers for six years prior. Such a vicious disease that robs its victims of their very identity.
Mattie Ross from near Dardanelle in Yell County is one of the most memorable characters in Western literature. She is surrounded by other unforgettables, Rooster Cogburn and Texas Ranger LaBoeuf among them, but she is the heart and soul of this novel and while she is looking for true grit in a man to chase down her father’s killer, she is the person with true grit in this novel and that is unmistakable.
It is a fast-paced novel that I swept through in one day. Of course, knowing the story beforehand is a double-edged sword, it makes the reading flow but it takes the surprise out of coming events. One of the things I dearly prized was Charles Portis� sense of humor that is peppered throughout the book and made me chuckle aloud a time or two.
Describing the sitting judge in Fort Smith: On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife’s religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need of some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make.
Or wrangling with Mr. Stonehill, who gets the worst end of Mattie’s sharpness and persistence.
”Lawyer Daggett is the man who forced them into receivership,� said I. “They tried to ‘mess� with him. It was a feather in his cap. He is on familiar terms with important men in Little Rock. The talk is he will be governor one day.� “Then he is a man of little ambition,� said Stonehill, “incommensurate with his capacity for making mischief.�
I have seen both movie versions of True Grit and enjoyed them equally. A great movie based on a great book. Well done, Mr. Portis. ...more
In a momentary lapse of self-control, I picked up my copy of Lonesome Dove and got lost once more in the wonder that is Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call anIn a momentary lapse of self-control, I picked up my copy of Lonesome Dove and got lost once more in the wonder that is Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call and all the assorted characters that people their world. If anyone ever asked me if I had been to Montana, I would have to say “yes�, and every step of land between the Milk River and Lonesome Dove, Texas. Never has a story felt more real, been more packed with personalities, more genuine in its depiction of place, or more perfectly told.
Even the characters you do not admire, you sadly understand. When McMurtry says of Elmira Johnson:
She wanted July and Joe to be gone, suddenly, so she would not have to deal with them every day. Their needs were modest enough, but she no longer wanted to face them. She had reached a point where doing anything for anyone was a strain. It was like heavy work, it was so hard.
you momentarily understand what drives her. She is living a life she does not want in being a wife and mother, and the attempt to do that is a burden she can no longer carry. It doesn’t matter that her life is not a bad life, what matters is that it is not, any longer, “her� life.
In fact, this book might mostly be about people seeking, often to their own detriment, the lives they have lost. Each of them has an ideal in their head that they are chasing: Call has Montana; Gus has Clara; Lorie has San Francisco; Ellie has Dee Boot; Clara has the idea of a son, all yearnings based on losses they have already experienced.
The book is peppered with wit and humor, and with wisdom. Even in its tragic moments, Gus is able to infuse both of those elements into the situation. He gives advice in such a folksy, off-hand, manner, but the truth lying beneath his observations is never lost on the reader.
Life in San Francisco is still just life. If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk--and feisty gentlemen.
This is the fastest 900 page novel you will ever read. It never slows or hits patches that you want to speed through. You feel the elements in the descriptions of the weather, the weight of the losses, the constant danger of just living in this place and time; but you never want it to stop. You want to travel beyond the next river, scrape off the mud, and then cross another plain or find another grassland. You want to sleep in the saddle because you are exhausted and then share a plate of Bol’s beans or Po Campo’s fried grasshoppers.
If there was ever a versatile writer, it was Larry McMurtry. This is far from being the only magnificent novel he produced, but it is far and away his best. It is iconic and unparalleled in its scope and its accomplishment. If you like character driven novels of epic proportions, but you’re thinking you don’t like “westerns�, don’t miss this remarkable book. It is a masterpiece that happens to be set in the West and deals with so much more than a simple review, like this one, can ever express. ...more
Tribulation Periwinkle has gone from her home in the North to Washington D.C. to be a nurse for the wounded soldiers of the Army of the Potomac. She dTribulation Periwinkle has gone from her home in the North to Washington D.C. to be a nurse for the wounded soldiers of the Army of the Potomac. She describes, in what reads like a diary of recollections, her trip from home to D.C., her arrival at the understaffed hospital, where she is thrown into the care of dying men, and her own subsequent illness that takes her back to her home again.
Several of the vignettes are quite poignant, recounting the suffering and dying around her. She also tackles the attitudes and treatment of the black servants that work in and around the hospital, and who receive as harsh a rejection from these Northerners as they might have expected from the South, which gives Alcott a forum to advocate for more than Abolition, but also for fair treatment of these newly freed men.
This is a quick read and an important one. Louisa May Alcott writes fiction, but it is informed by personal experience, and her own nursing of soldiers during the Civil War makes this a very realistic depiction. An early advocate for rights for both women and blacks, Alcott is a voice of the future and a glimpse into the past. ...more
This novel was not at all about what I had anticipated it would be, and surprised me in a very good way. Booth Tarkington is one of those names you knThis novel was not at all about what I had anticipated it would be, and surprised me in a very good way. Booth Tarkington is one of those names you know, you feel you certainly must have read, but then you realize you never have. I have two of his novels on my Pulitzer challenge, this one and Alice Adams. I am looking forward to the second now that I have sampled the wares.
Written in 1918, The Magnificent Ambersons is the story of George Amberson Minafer, a pompous, spoiled, arrogant little SOB who you want to smack around the ears, and who inspires that same desire in many of the people he meets. He is the grandson of a man who has made his own fortune and whose children take the money for granted and spend it. But the world is changing rapidly, the stock market is full of new opportunities, but fraught with risk; there are new inventions everywhere, but it is difficult to sort the ones that will succeed from the ones that won't and you might be tempted to bet that the horse and buggy isn’t going to be usurped by the automobile, much to your own dismay. In short, millionaires are being made and broken and the city is spreading outward, spurred by more mobility, and the influence of a single family is being diminished with the spread.
But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace. I think men’s minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess. But you can’t have the immense outward changes that they will cause without some inward ones, and it may be that George is right, and that the spiritual alteration will be bad for us.
Substitute “computer� for “automobile� and you will see that we have witnessed the same kind of society change in our lifetimes. I’m not sure whether that comforts me or not, but it does put a different perspective on what I sometimes view as the out-of-control progress of our world, the progress that doesn’t stop to consider the harm that might be done along with the advancement. There was so much here that I could relate to our own lives and times. Our economy is a shifting sand and technology did to many industries, two of which were my own mainstay, exactly what the auto did to horses.
The hubris of those who have inherited wealth, instead of earned wealth, is not something that has changed much either, and I could identify with the thrifty older people, who were viewed as miserly because they wanted their children to hold on to a little of the wealth instead of treating it like a well that could not go dry.
George is an enigma, in a way. He is arrogant and self-centered, but he is also proud and intelligent. He could do something with his life, had all the people in his family not treated him like he was a crown prince. Everyone suffers the consequences of the man they have created from the overindulged boy. In this world where we are always trying to buy our children more "things", I believe there is some good advice on child rearing in these pages, as well.
It’s been the same all his life: everything he did was noble and perfect. He had a domineering nature to begin with, and she let it go on, and fostered it till it absolutely ruled her. I never saw a plainer case of a person’s fault making them pay for having it!
You don’t want to like George, but at some point you do, because you feel sorry for him, knowing he is never going to build happiness without laying a solid foundation; but foundations are not something he thinks he needs, he believes his grandfather has laid a foundation that will support him forever. Of all the people who do not see George clearly, George is the worst offender. He never sees himself as he is and never stops to consider that “noble and perfect� might not be the adjectives that most people would readily apply to him.
I loved this quote, Eugene speaking of George:
That’s one of the greatest puzzles of human vanity, dear; and I don’t pretend to know the answer. In all my life, the most arrogant people that I’ve known have been the most sensitive. The people who have done the most in contempt of other people’s opinion, and who consider themselves the highest above it, have been the most furious if it went against them. Arrogant and domineering people can’t stand the least, lightest, faintest breath of criticism. It just kills them.
Confess, you know someone like this, don’t you? I think all of us do.
I could go on quoting this book endlessly. I marked dozens of passages. I will not do that...I will only suggest that you might find it an interesting read if you have any empty space on your TBR. When I started writing this review, I had decided I was giving this a 4-star rating; by the time I got to this point, I realized I really thought it was an amazing book and that it deserved all 5-stars. I like a book that makes me think of things that go beyond the story itself, a book in which the characters are drawn clearly as individuals, but have that element that can make them stand for a society as a whole or a segment thereof.
I think the Pulitzer committee got this one right...they don’t always do that. ...more
Her baptizing robe was put away in the bottom of the cupboard to be used for her shroud when she died, and her name was no longer Mary but Sister MaryHer baptizing robe was put away in the bottom of the cupboard to be used for her shroud when she died, and her name was no longer Mary but Sister Mary.
I tried very hard to keep this book in the time period in which it was written and view it from that perspective. If a black woman had written this story (and you can be sure if she had it would have been quite different), it would never have seen the press. In 1929, this book, no doubt, broke through many barriers.
Even with that in mind, it was a bit difficult to read this white woman’s take on a black woman’s life without wincing now and then. The lives of the blacks are not made to seem easy, but a great deal of what drove the lives of black men and women at the time was simply not addressed, and people outside the community this novel focuses on were made to seem always kind and helpful.
On the train everybody was kind, from the engineer to the conductor. They gave him two seats and asked if the baby’s milk was hot and sweet. They washed the milk bottle and did everything they could to help him. People are kind all over the world.
Yes, people are kind all over the world, but people all over the world are not always kind.
I think it was done with a good spirit. Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it was meant to be a revelation that these were people with feelings and problems and heartaches, but it also reinforced the idea that these were people who didn’t quite understand the moral code of the Bible and were somewhat simple-minded, even when they were strong. These were people who needed to be tolerated and guided.
White people are curious things. They pass laws no matter how fool the laws are, and put people in jail if those laws are not kept. People had come into the world over the same old road ever since Eve birthed Cain and Abel, and now everybody had to learn how to birth children a new way.
I suspect Julia Peterkin was very proud of her open-mindedness and compassion and that she felt she had accomplished a great deal with writing from the African-American point of view. Perhaps she was right. Black women had no voice at all in the 1920’s rural South, so the voice of a white woman was probably better than no voice at all.
Her writing style is very folksy and the story flows along. The attempt to capture dialect was rather off-putting, but then again, this is me looking back a century later. This book is mostly useful from a historical point of view, for it is only in that context that you could imagine it being awarded a prize.
One thing Julia Peterkin did that I will be forever grateful for is to facilitate the publishing of A Lamb in His Bosom. Caroline Miller asked for her help and Peterkin forwarded the manuscript to her publisher. Lamb in His Bosom won the Pulitzer in 1934. Now that is a book still worth reading! ...more
Dido in The Aeneid - “I have lived and accomplished the task that Destiny gave me, and now I shall pass beneath the earth no common shade.�
My chalDido in The Aeneid - “I have lived and accomplished the task that Destiny gave me, and now I shall pass beneath the earth no common shade.�
My challenge to read all the Pulitzer prize winners for fiction has led me to some great books, some awful books, and some books that left no impression at all. This book is one of those that makes the whole project worthwhile. I do not think I would ever have read this without the Prize as an impetus, and I would have missed a marvelous and meaningful story.
Jane Ward is a young girl of sixteen when we first meet her, daughter of an upper class family living in 1898 Chicago. She has a best friend who attends school with her by the name of Agnes, who is disapproved of by her mother, because Agnes is not quite in the same social strata; two other friends, Muriel and Flora, who are sanctioned for the reverse reason; and a boy friend, Andre, who is definitely not considered an acceptable potential suitor.
The novel covers all of Jane’s life, and each of these early acquaintances have a major impact on the direction it takes. She struggles with all the questions and emotions each of us struggle with in life, including defining and recognizing love.
Love was no hothouse flower, forced to reluctant bud. Love was a weed that flashed unexpectedly into bloom on the roadside. Love was not fanned to flame. Love was a leaping fire, sprung from a casual spark, a fire that wouldn’t be smothered.
But is that what love is? Is it a fire? Maybe it is a shared experience or something that grows over time with familiarity and mutual interests. If it isn’t a hothouse flower, might it still be one that is planted and tended and cared for until it blooms? Are love and romance synonymous? Can you love more than one person at a time, or does one love cancel another?
She straddles the fence between what she thinks she should feel and what she does feel. Do you follow your heart or your upbringing? How much do you owe parents or society?
Your inner life–how confusing it all was! A chaos of conflicting loyalties!
There is, of course, loss to be dealt with in life, and with that loss comes some maturity and revelation. In fact, what do we really know even of those who are the closest to us?
But was death, as a matter of fact, any more lonely than life? What had Jane ever known about her father’s actual earthly experience? Parents knew little enough of the emotional lives of their children, but children knew nothing of the emotional lives of their parents. The emotional life of a parent was a fantastic thought.
And what of independence? As the novel progresses into the 1900’s, women are beginning to have more options and want more choices. Is that a good or a bad thing? What is all this freedom going to mean to the next generation and what is going to be sacrificed in order to obtain it?
During her life, Jane is forced to make some very difficult and painful decisions. One of the central themes of Years of Grace is the importance of how those hard decisions are made, what is factored in making them, and what does the final decision say about your character. Sometimes the choices that seem to be the wrong ones for us turn out to be blessings, or perhaps we lose opportunities forever because we lack the courage to seize them. Different paths would have led to different places, but not necessarily better ones. The trick in life might be to savor what you have rather than to pine for what you have not.
I had some small difficulty in obtaining a copy of this book to read, which makes me sad, because lack of availability can cause a book not to receive the attention it deserves. If you can find a copy of this one, read it. I wish Persephone Books would add this one to their offerings; it belongs there. ...more
This novel put me in mind of Edith Wharton and her tales of class mobility, or the lack thereof, in the society of the 1920s. Tarkington has addressedThis novel put me in mind of Edith Wharton and her tales of class mobility, or the lack thereof, in the society of the 1920s. Tarkington has addressed a similar situation here, a young girl who is just enough below the status of her peers to have a hard time keeping up and fitting in. Her mother is a disagreeable creature and her father doesn’t seem to understand the ramifications or difficulties of the position Alice is in. For him, she is his lovely daughter, why would anyone mistreat her; wouldn’t everyone love her?
I felt quite sorry for the father, Virgil Adams. He is a consummately decent man, who is forced into a questionable position by a nagging wife who wants status for her children and his love for a daughter, who no doubt is worthy of more than she is getting. The thing that struck me most about Alice was that she might have been perfectly happy if someone had simply given her to permission to be herself and belong to the upper middle class life that she is born into.
At times, she recognizes the false face she finds herself putting forward and despises it.
Almost everything she had said to him was upon spontaneous impulse, springing to her lips on the instant; yet it all seemed to have been founded upon a careful design, as if some hidden self kept such designs in stock and handed them up to her, ready-made, to be used for its own purpose. What appeared to be the desired result was a false-coloured image in Russell’s mind; but if he liked that image he wouldn’t be like Alice Adams; nor would anything he thought about the image be a thought about her.
The story is well-written and left me with a lot to think about regarding what really matters in life and how easily people actually do misunderstand one another. Not all of the very wealthy are painted as inhumane, although they are often clueless, and the divide between Alice and the other girls is understandable, since we tend to gravitate to those who share our lives and experiences.
By this time most of “the other girls,� her contemporaries, were away at school or college, and when they came home to stay, they “came out�--that feeble revival of an ancient custom offering the maiden to the ceremonial inspection of the tribe. Alice neither went away nor “came out�, and, in contrast with those who did, she may have seemed to lack freshness of lustre--jewels are richest when revealed all new in a white velvet box.
Like in any real tragedy, this train is headed for disaster, destiny is the engineer, and everytime the train stops and those who want to avoid being involved in the crash might disembark, they refuse to.
Sadly, this novel has a glaring drawback and one that I cannot help but acknowledge. There is, threaded throughout the book, a use of racial slurs and stereotypes that make the reader wince. I am fairly deft at placing a book within its historical context and allowing for the differences in that time and this, but this book went beyond the pale for me. I think what made it so egregious was that these people and their attitudes had nothing to do with the story being told, they added nothing to the understanding of the events, and they could have been left out without ever being missed. Race was not at issue here, nor was a single black character an actual mover of plot or meaning. Having just recently read Strange Fruit, it was simply impossible to gloss over these passages as if they were not there, and this alone kept me from giving this book a 5-star rating. I would encourage anyone who reads it to be prepared for some discomfort in this regard....more
Eudora Welty writes books that seem to be about nothing in particular. There are seldom any staggering occurrences. It is all about life. Of course, tEudora Welty writes books that seem to be about nothing in particular. There are seldom any staggering occurrences. It is all about life. Of course, there is a major event coming in this novel, Dabney Fairchild is marrying, and all the family are gathering for the event; aunts, uncles, cousins, great-aunts, in-laws, all assembling to see Dabney off from the family home to a home of her own.
Along the way, we meet an array of fantastic characters, each an embodiment of their Southern heritage. This is a way of life that is virtually gone, I suppose, but it is a way of life that opens so many memories for me that it makes me want to cry. I was never, of course, one of THESE Southern belles, with the portico porches or land wealth and stores, but I can easily recall days when everyone from five generations would be gathered together in this same kind of family mash that sometimes brought with it ease and sometimes strain.
Welty knows people. Every word they utter in her stories rings with truth and veracity. You feel you have met them, you are there on the porch, you are sipping the iced tea, swinging the children, kissing the uncles. You are safe, as they are safe, because you have family, you belong, someone cares.
It has taken me a long time to get around to reading this wonderful story. I can add it to my list of Eudora Welty wonders that I have loved....more
Written in a simple and straightforward fashion, this book is anything but simple in its message and impact. The choice of having a different narratorWritten in a simple and straightforward fashion, this book is anything but simple in its message and impact. The choice of having a different narrator for each chapter would not work well in just anyone’s hands, but Gaines is not just anyone, and he makes this device serve to reveal the truth of the situation without any bias or personal slant.
How could anyone read this without feeling a great deal of pride for the subject old men? Each of them reaches into his deepest self and emerges as his own master, a role they have each been denied for most of their lives. When Charlie declares, “I am a man,� he seems to speak not just for himself, but for all of the old men.
Eudora Welty weaves a very Southern tale around a Mississippi family who are staging a family reunion that is also a celebration of the family’s oldesEudora Welty weaves a very Southern tale around a Mississippi family who are staging a family reunion that is also a celebration of the family’s oldest member, Granny Vaughn. This felt like going back in time and visiting the world of my childhood. My own extended family had an annual reunion at a small church in the mountains where my father was born, and I have sat through dinners that spread like the food was endless and heard the musings and memories of great-aunts and uncles, aunts and uncles, and cousins that were old enough to be my parents. I laughed, applauded the things that knit these people together, but felt the element of sadness that ran through many of these lives. Even those stories told with humor often dealt with subjects so serious that they altered lives forever.
Aside from the story, Eudora Welty might be one of the most beautiful descriptive writers I have ever come across. You could open this book to any random page and lift an amazing passage, which is what I am doing here:
The crowd was forming around three sides of the new grave hole. Where Mr. Comfort had been supposed to go was the last grave at the river end of the cemetery. At its back stood only an old cedar trunk, white against gray space. Its bark was sharp folded as linen, it was white as a tablecloth. Wreaths and sprays of spiky florist flowers from Ludlow--gladioli and carnations and ferns--were being stood on their wire frames around the grave, and the homemade offerings--the flower-heads sewn onto box lids and shirt cardboards and the fruit jars and one milk can packed with yard lilies and purple phlox and snow-on-the-mountain--were given room to the side.
I was literally standing at the grave and I could feel the respect and emotion that prompted those homemade offerings.
Welty treats with some very serious topics during the course of this novel. I wondered about the isolation that could exist in the midst of such a close community, about the lack of justice for some and the miscarriage of punishments for others. I was amazed by the ability this family showed to forgive and accept, and the sense that much of the acceptance arose from the almost fatalistic nature of life in such an environment.
This is my first Welty novel. She has been on my reading list for a long time. I will surely read more of her work at the first opportunity. ...more
Faulkner obviously could not leave Temple Drake as we last saw her in Sanctuary. There was more to her story and it must have haunted him, as it hauntFaulkner obviously could not leave Temple Drake as we last saw her in Sanctuary. There was more to her story and it must have haunted him, as it haunted me, for he returned to her twenty years later to put her soul under a microscope.
I, unlike so many, do not view Temple as an evil person. I view her as a damaged soul, someone who has been so marred by life that she can no longer function. She fails to understand, even herself, what makes her unable to feel emotion as others do, and she carries the blame within her for her obvious shortcomings. She is trapped forever in the moment of her life in which she gets into a car with a drunkard and leaves her life and self behind. Married to Gowan, she can never hope to escape that moment...for even his mere presence is a constant reminder.
To read this without first reading Sanctuary would certainly lessen the impact of the story, and in truth, I do not think you could sufficiently understand Temple without the background story that unfolds in Sanctuary. Faulkner is such a remarkable writer and his works are so layered, that I think I will still be thinking about these characters and dissecting them for some time.
The format used here is quite unique. There is a play, sandwiched within three sections of historical exposition of Jackson and Yoknapatawpha County. The history is riveting and it is unbelievable how much information and emotion Faulkner is able to convey in a these rather short sections.
I pondered the title. Faulkner does nothing haphazardly, so I’m absolutely sure there is some deep meaning to this choice. A requiem is a mass for the dead soul--and that is easy enough to equate to Temple. Her soul is undoubtedly dead. But, why a nun? Is she cloistered by her past, living apart from society, from secular life? She has no spiritual attachment to save her, nothing to worship that I can see. If anyone else has an idea about the title, I would love to hear your thoughts. ...more
Who knew Poe could write about life at sea with the same kind of detail and description as Melville. I could feel the terror of the storm at3.5 stars.
Who knew Poe could write about life at sea with the same kind of detail and description as Melville. I could feel the terror of the storm at sea and the desperation of being adrift. The story became a bit laborious at times, but for the most part it was exciting and Poe didn't miss a good opportunity to include his favorite theme of the horror of being buried alive. ...more
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