Barkskins, by Annie Proulx, "a tale of long-term, shortsighted greed whose subject could not be more important: the destruction of America's forests."
Annie Proulx's multi-generational story begins in 1693 with the colonization of "New France," the vast tract of north America and Canada colonized by the French between the 16th and 18th centuries. René Sel and Charles Duquet arrive in the new country as indentured servants to a harsh if not entirely brutal property owner and taskmaster, Monsieur Trépagny.
René and Charles, awestruck by the imposing, often impenetrable and
seemingly limitless extent of the forest, react to it in strikingly
different ways. René cleaves to his inner woodsman, shaping himself to
the land, puzzled by the drive to cut further into the forest than
necessary. Eventually, he marries Mari, a Mi’kmaq woman skilled in the
therapeutic use of plants, enfolding her existing children with the
couple’s own, and setting in train one of the novel’s key strands: the
constant tension that their descendants feel as they negotiate their
dual heritage.
The next 650 pages trace the bloodlines of these two men in an often
grisly chronicle of deforestation, cultural erasure and international
commerce. We sit in on vomit-strewn ocean crossings, shady business
deals in Dutch coffee houses and fatal feuds between rival logging crews
razing land wrested from the native population. The rags-to-riches rise
of Duquet (always referred to by his surname) and the fortunes of his
in-fighting heirs contrast with the fate of René’s mixed-race
descendants, expropriated, exploited and scattered from New England to
New Zealand in search of a livelihood.
As the book moves from generation to generation, a general thesis
reveals itself: The concept of personal property, facilitated by
technology and propelled by the Christian mandate for dominion, is
largely to blame for the genocide of indigenous people and the impending
ecological collapse. ________________________________ This review is drawn from several reviews, including by Rich Smith, The Stranger, William T Vollman, the New York Times, and Alex Clark and Anthony Cummins, The Guardian.
In his first novel, "About Grace," Anthony Doerr drags his protagonist,
David Winkler, over a fair few hot coals: 25 years of exile as a
dogsbody in a new hotel in St. Vincent in the Caribbean, a near-drowning
experience, malnutrition, a clinically debilitating journey in a
clapped-out Datsun across the vastness of America, an Alaskan winter in
an unheated shed, gradual loss of eyesight, an alienated daughter he
abandoned when she was a few months old. The comparisons with Lear are
flickering and fugitive but inevitable. As Winkler himself thinks: "I
have already been reduced. Leave me be." Why does Doerr inflict so much
on this quiet, retreating hydrologist, a man obsessed with water and
snow?
Winkler is no ordinary man. He sometimes dreams of things that, in his waking
life, come true. As a boy, he dreams of a man coming out of a shop with a
hatbox who will shortly be run over by a bus. In a few days, it
happens. This life of prolepsis, with frequent illuminations of déjà vu,
of "the vertigo of future aligning with the present," becomes his
unraveling. He dreams of the woman with whom he is going to fall in love
and the exactness of the circumstances as well. Before long, he is
locked in an intense relationship with Sandy Sheeler, married to Herman
Sheeler for more than 15 years. Sandy gets pregnant, leaves her husband
and Anchorage with Winkler and sets up a new life with him in Cleveland.
A few months after their daughter, Grace, is born, Winkler dreams of an
imminent flood in which she will drown while he is trying to save her
from the rising waters.
To avoid this fate, he escapes to St. Vincent, where he is rescued by a
Chilean cook, Felix, and his wife, Soma, both exiles themselves from
Chile's political violence and repression. For 25 years, which Doerr
oddly manages to telescope so that it feels like a tenth of that time,
Winkler lives on the island in a dilapidated shed, working as general
factotum in an offshore restaurant. It is his friendship with Felix and
Soma's little girl, Naaliyah, to whom he is friend, father figure,
mentor (even academic referee when she decides to go to graduate school
in the United States), that holds out the hope of salvation for him. In
an act of redemption that allows Winkler to reorder the patterns of a
past he has been expiating, he is released from the paralytic torpor
afflicting his life. He returns to the United States to search for the
wife and daughter he had abandoned.
Doerr
traverses again the territory he had marked out in the stories of his
lucent first book, the short-story collection "The Shell Collector"
(2002): a rapture with nature expressed in prose that sings off the
page; an infinitely subtle algebra of resonance and sympathy between
minds, lives, objects, light, senses, weather; the majestic indifference
of nature; the proper measure of man against natural forces. Doerr has a
compulsion for observation and a passion for nature that borders on the
religious.
But
in "About Grace," this very strength snakes in on itself and becomes
its perilous opposite; what was pitched so perfectly in the
circumscribed space of a short story can appear overwrought, extended
now over 400 pages -- a hothouse product, at times so swooningly in love
with itself that it cannot resist yet another perfectly turned sentence
(or four) on the miracle of the hexagonal structure of snow when more
important action is pressing. Doerr's interest in nature is so obsessive
that the whole equation of man in nature becomes heavily skewed in
favor of the latter, producing fiction of rapturous beauty but of an
oddly cold, uninvolving nature, as if it were embalmed in its own
lustrous style.
A
passage about Winkler seems to hold the key both to Doerr's philosophy
and to the central weakness of the book. "All day . . . a sensitivity
had been building within him: the slightest shift in light or air
touched the backs of his eyes, reached membranes inside his nose. It was
as if, like a human divining rod, he had been attuning to vapor as it
gathered in the atmosphere, sensing it -- water rising in the xylem of
trees, leaching out of stones, even the last unfrozen volumes, gargling
deep beneath the forest in tangled, rocky aquifers -- all these waters
rising through the air, accumulating in the clouds, stretching and
binding, condensing and precipitating -- falling." This encapsulates the
whole problem of a style that can sometimes stray into the
self-consciously hypersensitive and precious as well as the problem of
balance, the way the human is compulsively stunted in favor of the
natural.
The
human action and human interests, characterization, dialogue, all
appear oddly attenuated when set within the frame of this overdeveloped
poetic realism. Faced with the occasionally thin credibility of the
characters, the exquisite avenues of light and cloud formations and ice
crystals down which Doerr leads us prove disappointingly to be
cul-de-sacs when we reach the inevitable destination.
Doerr
reaches heroically toward the humanization of his novel with Winkler's
return to the United States and his attempts to reinscribe himself into
the notion and experience of family by tracing his daughter, Grace, now a
young woman with a child of 6, Christopher.
Just as his relationship
with Naaliyah, a proxy daughter, set him on the path to finding his real
one, this time, too, Winkler is given hope, absolution and grace by
Herman Sheeler and Christopher, in two relationships combining atonement
and a rewriting of the past, a relearning of responsibility.
These are
definitely the most moving sections of the book, but too much brightness
dazzles and distracts, and the wall of luminous prose almost fences off
the reader's heart, something Doerr clearly wants to sway. A writer as
dizzyingly talented and as generous as Doerr should be confident enough
to do away with some of the more blinding fireworks.
I reached the crest of Goat Ridge just as twilight was seeping through the forested slopes and valleys of the Goat Rocks Wilderness. I let the pack slip from my back to the ground and stood watching the sky going gold.
Gray-black cloud hanging there refusing to take on the pink hue that more distant clouds accepted gracefully. Darkness was now inking the sky.
I need to start a fire. Heat the dinner that I bought with my REI dividend.
If she were here we'd be eating by now, despite my vote for watching the sunset. "They'll be plenty of time for that."
But there wasn't. In the end, there wasn't time for exploring the world, traveling to exotic places, or even Epcot, or starting a family.
There was no time for other sunsets.
I forget about dinner and sit on a rock outcropping watching darkness descend. Taking time for regret.
At the crest of Burbidge Hill
an easterly wind caressed his face
the mosquitoes fell away
and the screaming stopped
He stood there hunched over
His hands on his face
and when he took them away
They held a soup of
His blood and dead mosquitoes
It took him three hours
to hike to the hut
and by the time he reached it
the sky was a reddish-purple
The jackals that made their den
near an occasional creek in the east field
were yipping and chattering
and collared doves
Perched in tree limbs overhead
craning their necks
stared down at them
with disdain
He threw his pack down
on the split log that served
as a bench at the door
and tearing off what remained
of his tattered shirt
went to the pump
After he washed his arms and chest
and rinsed black bits of mosquito
from his mouth
He went to his pack
and removed a small bundle
Wrapped in dirty rags
He carefully unwound the rags
and pulled from the bloody nest
an irregular stone
covered in dark mud
He washed the stone
rubbing the mud from it
with his thumbs
and then he washed
Bunji's blood from the stone
Watching
as if from a shroud
the Black Opal emerged
I finished this last night, and then tried to sleep -- Ambien helped. This book is very hard to put down, and very hard to stop thinking about. Read it before you see the movie.
The book is now being made into a movie. I think it will be good. Here's the trailer for The Girl With All The Gifts, directed by Colm
McCarthy and starring Sennia Nanua, Gemma Arterton, Glenn Close and
Paddy Considine. Coming soon.
This crime drama by Steve Hamilton received a lot of very good reviews, so I got it out of my local library and started reading it. I needed a break from the more serious reading of Kevin Gutzman's, James Madison and the Making of America. I'm half way through Nick Mason's second life. I have the distinct impression I've read this before. Not this particular book, but other stories like it. The anti-hero, hero. Troubled past, troubled guy, in over his head. Trying to be a better person. Fates conspire. You know what I mean.
I'll let you know what I think when I'm finished.
______________________________________
I'm finished. Thank goodness. My take?
Laughably implausible plot.
Clichéd characters up and down the cast ladder, but especially the main character, "Nick." I can't tell you too much without revealing the plot line and outcome, but let me say this, "Jack Reacher" does it better, without all the whining, and with a more satisfying, if similar outcome.
I've read and enjoyed Steve Hamilton before -- A Cold Day in Paradise, The Lock Artist (which I particularly liked) -- his writing is straight forward, crisp, and he has an outstanding ability to put the reader in the action's locale.
I'll try another book by Hamilton. I know he can do better.
Hugo & Nebula Award Winning novel by the author of Water Knife.
From windupstories.com
"Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen’s Calorie Man in Thailand.
Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok’s street
markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap
the bounty of history’s lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko.
One of the New People, Emiko is not human; instead, she is an
engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent
whims of a Kyoto businessman, but now abandoned to the streets of
Bangkok. Regarded as soulless beings by some, devils by others, New
People are slaves, soldiers, and toys of the rich in a chilling near
future in which calorie companies rule the world, the oil age has
passed, and the side effects of bio-engineered plagues run rampant
across the globe."
