Every now and then I come across a book that requires more time from me than others.  Such books don’t always have to be hefty like Dostoevsky or Melville (I spent a whole summer reading The Brothers Karamazov, still haven’t finished Moby Dick).  If the book is full of enough depth and beauty to make me reread paragraphs, it doesn’t have to break the 250 page mark to consume more time than average.  Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping is one such book.  The novel precedes her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead, and is one of the best books I’ve read in some time.

The novel involves two sisters: Ruthie and Lucille.  The sisters go through a slough of parental guardians, when their aunt, Sylvie, finally settles in for good.  Sylvie is what is known as a “transient,” and though she’s a welcome addition over the stuffy great-aunts before her, her way of life challenges the sisters’ ideals.  Eventually, a rift develops between Ruthie and Lucille.  Growth, maturation, and the desire to fit into societal norms arise between them, and they are forced to confront the differences breaching their love for each other.

The story is told in an authentic voice, forcing the reader to ask whether they’re reading a memoir or a work of fiction.  She also tells the story in a language rarely seen in contemporary literature.  Typically, I am attracted to fiction that opens with every gun blazing (Barry Hannah, Jim Harrison, and William Gay come to mind).  However, Robinson’s language is so gorgeous that I read on, wondering how she’ll surprise me next.  One passage in particular blew me away: “The sky above Fingerbone was a floral yellow.  A few spindled clouds smoldered and glowed a most unfiery pink.  And then the sun flung a long shaft over the mountain, and another, like a long-legged insect bracing itself out of its chrysalis, and then it showed above the black crest, bristly and red and improbable” (147).  This is only a small fragment of the talent Robinson displays in this work.

If you’re interested in a quiet, heartfelt, and beautifully told story, read this book.  Be prepared to focus, think, weigh, and consider the content.  It’s not a book to be read quickly.

-Ellis

part three: tom robbins

check out tom robbins’ books by clicking on this sentence

the tao of physics by fritjof capra

varieties of religious experience by william james

the masks of god: creative mythology by joseph campbell

the masks of god: occidental mythology by josephy campbell

the masks of god: oriental mythology by joseph campbell

the masks of god: primitive mythology by joseph campbell

Catch Drive-By Truckers at Hal & Mal’s Saturday, June 26th. Doors open at 7:00; Show at 8:00.

This show is part of Hal & Mal’s summer concert series on Commerce Street.

Official Website of Drive-By Truckers

On Thursday, July 2, Lemuria’s book club “Atlantis” will be discussing Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2008 publication of her second book of short stories: Unaccustomed Earth.  For her first short story collection titled Interpreter of Maladies, this accomplished internationally known Indian writer, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000.  Many readers will also remember reading her novel The Namesake which was make into a movie in 2003.

In Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri creates interestingly developed characters, who live in the United States, whose parents are from India. In the first short story actually titled “Unaccustomed Earth”, Lahiri presents a recently widowed man who visits his grown daughter’s home in California and plants a garden with his three year old grandson. As the daughter inwardly debates whether to ask her father to move in with her and her husband and child, the reader learns on the sly about the new love that her father has made on international vacations. The ironic twist at the end is  delightfully welcomed by the reader. Subsequent stories, “Hell-Heaven” and “A Choice of Accommodations,” both set in the east, especially in and around the New York City locale, deal with the native Indian culture and how it mixes with modern day urban styles, mores, and customs, both in the setting as well as in the characters’ inward thoughts. A master at the contained, yet fully developed short story, Lahiri has the power to grab the reader, throw him into a setting and into intricate character relationships as if the reader had  been involved in a novel instead of a twenty or so page short story. From my Lahiri reading so far, I would call her a master of irony.

Come join us in the newly renovated lobby of Banner Hall just outside of Lemuria’s front door, next Thursday, at 5:15 p.m. as we book clubbers have fun discussing Unaccustomed Earth. If you can’t join us this time, come on Thursday, August 6 for a lively discussion of Ethan Canin’s America, America.

-Nan

For those of you who don’t know him, Greg Miller is a professor at Millsaps and a poet who has several publications under his belt. His latest book of poems, Watch, is coming out in October and I am really looking forward to it! Dr. Miller’s past publications include: Iron Wheel, Rib Cage and Mississippi Sudan… go by Lemuria and check out his work so that you can look forward to Watch as much as I am!

“Time after time, in poem after poem in this book, the brave colors of the creatures of this God-given world are celebrated as they survive, sometimes barely survive, or not, as the light turns: a flower awakening; an oak tree splitting in a storm; a loon diving; a tom turkey strutting; a rock lizard flecked with rocklike black and gray; human beings—a saint in a painting about who she was and what she suffered; Dinka refugees in a church, sharing a meal, and dancing; the fragments in a field of a long-gone culture, left there to teach us what they were. These beautiful attentive poems keep watch.”<David Ferry>

“In Watch we see Greg Miller at the top of his powers, inspired by the world of art and the world of nature, by moments of pain and moments of joy, by relationships and by solitude. These poems are rich and varied and haunting. They are, to use Eudora Welty’s words, ‘made by the imagination for the imagination.’”<Suzanne Marrs, author of Eudora Welty: A Biography>

“Greg Miller has the rare ability to make his devotional energies seem felt and available to all of us, in poems that are unlike anyone else’s in their intelligence and passionate meditation and mediation of the Christian myth. He’s a latter-day, wised-up Adam who, despite his exile from the garden, can’t suppress his desire to praise. He sees the natural world with a clear, joyous eye and achieves his own sense of supernatural abundance from the purged accuracy of his descriptions.”<Tom Sleigh>