Owls Head by Rosamond Purcell, Quantuck Lane Press, 2003, $25.00 cloth, ISBN 0971454868.
Form imitates subject in this story of William Buckminster, a Maine scrapyard dealer, and the friendship he shares with the author, Rosamond Purcell, an internationally-acclaimed writer and photographer. Bits of buried treasure are well worth the digging out of the seemingly unrelated chapters that zig and zag the story along. "Infiltration" tells of the author's first sighting of the dealer's domain; "Rag and Bone Shop" is an index of some of the objects she finds ("head of a broom like an army brush cut"); "Transgression" describes her long-awaited entry into his home. Purcell's structure mirrors not only his random collection but also her mind's surprising leaps. We begin with a profile of this rural eccentric and his kingdom of decaying objects, but we hit pay dirt with an exploration of how Purcell pursues her tendency to "fall in love . . . with the way things look."
William Buckminster, now nearing eighty, presides over (and is in mortal danger of being buried by) eleven acres of stuff-two centuries' worth of family antiques, decaying books, mountains of copper, rotting doll heads, and desiccated miscellany. Purcell, a sculptor and photographer, as well as a collaborator with Stephen J. Gould on three books and a column about art and science, is enchanted by the siren song of these piles. Her photos and essays have long been known for their precise composition of decaying books and objects. She finds mysterious lessons in the messages created by termites' random erasure of certain words on a book's page, the juxtaposition of animal and human images, and the way her rotting assemblages evoke a story. When she sees Buckminster's rubbish heap, she has found her Holy Grail.
They meet in 1981 when a photography class she is teaching in Rockport, Maine, goes on the road in search of subjects. "On the road to Owl's Head lighthouse . . . we saw it . . . It was mysterious in its excess. It was as if a magnet had dragged several hotels, a waterfront, and a whole town up or down the coast to this spot." She keeps returning, sometimes with a friend or a tape recorder, to snatch up more hood ornaments, hat blocks, gas caps, and ancient golf balls. Over time, she mines the owner's history as well as his property. But she refrains from mere clinical labels to explain his obsessions, for she feels a kinship with him. The mutual affection and respect between this "city girl" and the quiet but highly-opinionated widower is made clear in the conversation they have in the chapter called "Transcription." After twenty years of one-way visits, Purcell finally shows Buckminster around her Boston studio, and he pronounces it "absolutely amazing."
Purcell writes in the first chapter: "It will take the length of this book to explain the ways in which this love manifests itself." The author's artistic vision began at a young age, perhaps as a reaction to an academic father who always addressed his children with the question "Where is your book?" When she showed him her termite-eaten book piece, he tried to extract factual meaning from the remaining text. She, on the other hand, had stuffed the holes with butterfly wings, inspired by the theme of regeneration inherent in three of the remaining words, pere et fils.
Purcell's prose is as precise as her vision. She addresses potentially heavy subjects like aesthetic theory with a lightness of style, and her synapse-hops of delight in intuitive connection are contagious. After meditating on a piece displaying "the nature of Cat," she begins with a porous stone cat. She eventually positions a worm-bored shell, a piece of worm-eaten bread from World War I, and a bit of accordion next to it. Why? "The differences between wood and stone, bread, shell, and cat melt away because they are now together as Things that have Holes."
At five by eight inches, the book is too small to do justice to the photo reproductions in the lengthy but important "Notes" section. Still, it is a must for found-object fetishists, connoisseurs of surreal roadside discoveries, and family humanists of all generations.
Marcia Deihl
Copyright Harvard Review, Volume 26
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Book Review , Nadine Gordimer's "Loot"
Loot and Other Stories
Nadine Gordimer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York
ISBN 0374190909, $23.00 US (hardcover).
Marcia Deihl
Reviewer
As new readers discover the Nobel-prize-winning expatriate South African writer J. M. Coetzee, another South African writer may catch some of this reflected light. Nadine Gordimer's new book of ten short stories, "Loot," deserves it.
Although she is known as a "political" writer, Gordimer delights in more metaphysical matters here. Reincarnation and myth address human powerlessness (over death) just as stories about injustice address our ultimate limitations (in life). In Part 1 of the last story, "Karma," bad things happen to good families, black and white, when they buy a cunning little Dutch gabled house. This five-part story follows several "returns" of one spirit in different bodies and different lives. In one section the narrator is an unborn twin; in another, a white child is found in a toilet in a black township, brought up by black parents, and moves to the city. When she falls in love with a white man, all the questions of identity, home, race, and law are thrown into conflict. At first, deep in love, she sees no problem as she prepared to meet his nice middle class parents: " . . love is in the present, it's her hand slipping beneath his shirt to his chest, it's reading together descriptions of the places in the world maybe they'll save up to see. She did not say: they know I'm white. As if he heard the thought:--I know . . But that you grew up there, school and home, people who are like--your parents, to you--" Their advocate, a Jewish lawyer (stand in for Gordimer herself?), has a fine appreciation for racial injustice, and she battles to prove that this white woman is indeed white. But in a country where blacks often try to pass for white, a hastily drawn up birth certificate ("Race: Colored"--no white parents known) dooms the couple. A few years later, post- apartheid, there would have been no problem, and the formless narrator wonders how an arbitrary law could shift a couple's world so completely. Everyone loses when the literal color of one's skin calls forth decades of complex cultural histories. And South Africa is more complex than the United States, since it has a majority black culture and eleven separate languages are spoken, besides the colonizer's Afrikaans.
The first story, which some have called a naive fable, is the most challenging. Double reversals, mirror images, and the giant toggle switch of fate all enter into play. A giant wave floods away a town, leaving the ocean floor full of a former regime's riches. The poor forage for treasure, amidst the bodies of their murdered compatriots, but a rich man wants only one thing, a mirror. When he finds it, he looks in, and suddenly a second wave washes him away, along with all the others. Before his demise, he had slept with a print of "The Great Wave" by Hokusai, behind his bed. But he never gazed on it, since it was behind him. Did he not see the overthrow of apartheid coming? And when he looked in the mirror, did he see himself? With remorse or revulsion? Did he see the print, or the real wave? And was that second wave a metaphor for his own inner demons, or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, finally catching up with him? Gordimer leaves these crystal facets of interpretation up to the reader. This first story intrigued me more than conventional stories like the aging parent/younger woman plot in "Generation Gap," the interracial love affair in "Mission," or the loss of sexual innocence in "The Diamond Mine." It offered a different sort of "return"a constant revisiting of its possible meaning.
Gordimer has often claimed that she will never write autobiography. But the themes of her inner world are clear in her work: the senseless damnation of whole races of people by outdated law and custom, the triumph of sensuality and love across racial barriers, and the painfully slow changes in power in post-apartheid South Africa.
James A. Cox
Editor-in-Chief
Midwest Book Review
278 Orchard Drive
Oregon, WI 53575-1129
phone: 1-608-835-7937
e-mail: mbr@execpc.com
e-mail: mwbookrevw@aol.com
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Copyright ©2001
Nadine Gordimer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York
ISBN 0374190909, $23.00 US (hardcover).
Marcia Deihl
Reviewer
As new readers discover the Nobel-prize-winning expatriate South African writer J. M. Coetzee, another South African writer may catch some of this reflected light. Nadine Gordimer's new book of ten short stories, "Loot," deserves it.
Although she is known as a "political" writer, Gordimer delights in more metaphysical matters here. Reincarnation and myth address human powerlessness (over death) just as stories about injustice address our ultimate limitations (in life). In Part 1 of the last story, "Karma," bad things happen to good families, black and white, when they buy a cunning little Dutch gabled house. This five-part story follows several "returns" of one spirit in different bodies and different lives. In one section the narrator is an unborn twin; in another, a white child is found in a toilet in a black township, brought up by black parents, and moves to the city. When she falls in love with a white man, all the questions of identity, home, race, and law are thrown into conflict. At first, deep in love, she sees no problem as she prepared to meet his nice middle class parents: " . . love is in the present, it's her hand slipping beneath his shirt to his chest, it's reading together descriptions of the places in the world maybe they'll save up to see. She did not say: they know I'm white. As if he heard the thought:--I know . . But that you grew up there, school and home, people who are like--your parents, to you--" Their advocate, a Jewish lawyer (stand in for Gordimer herself?), has a fine appreciation for racial injustice, and she battles to prove that this white woman is indeed white. But in a country where blacks often try to pass for white, a hastily drawn up birth certificate ("Race: Colored"--no white parents known) dooms the couple. A few years later, post- apartheid, there would have been no problem, and the formless narrator wonders how an arbitrary law could shift a couple's world so completely. Everyone loses when the literal color of one's skin calls forth decades of complex cultural histories. And South Africa is more complex than the United States, since it has a majority black culture and eleven separate languages are spoken, besides the colonizer's Afrikaans.
The first story, which some have called a naive fable, is the most challenging. Double reversals, mirror images, and the giant toggle switch of fate all enter into play. A giant wave floods away a town, leaving the ocean floor full of a former regime's riches. The poor forage for treasure, amidst the bodies of their murdered compatriots, but a rich man wants only one thing, a mirror. When he finds it, he looks in, and suddenly a second wave washes him away, along with all the others. Before his demise, he had slept with a print of "The Great Wave" by Hokusai, behind his bed. But he never gazed on it, since it was behind him. Did he not see the overthrow of apartheid coming? And when he looked in the mirror, did he see himself? With remorse or revulsion? Did he see the print, or the real wave? And was that second wave a metaphor for his own inner demons, or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, finally catching up with him? Gordimer leaves these crystal facets of interpretation up to the reader. This first story intrigued me more than conventional stories like the aging parent/younger woman plot in "Generation Gap," the interracial love affair in "Mission," or the loss of sexual innocence in "The Diamond Mine." It offered a different sort of "return"a constant revisiting of its possible meaning.
Gordimer has often claimed that she will never write autobiography. But the themes of her inner world are clear in her work: the senseless damnation of whole races of people by outdated law and custom, the triumph of sensuality and love across racial barriers, and the painfully slow changes in power in post-apartheid South Africa.
James A. Cox
Editor-in-Chief
Midwest Book Review
278 Orchard Drive
Oregon, WI 53575-1129
phone: 1-608-835-7937
e-mail: mbr@execpc.com
e-mail: mwbookrevw@aol.com
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Copyright ©2001
Monday, March 9, 2009
UPCOMING GIG - Women Take Over Harvard!
Celebrate the 1971 Takeover (I was on the march) of a Harvard Building by women's liberation forces!
The Cambridge Women's Center still stands today as a result! I will be leading sing along songs from that wild time.
Monday March 16
6:30 p.m.
Cambridge City Hall Annex
Sponsored by Cambridge Historical Commission and Cambridge Women's Commission
See below:
http://www.cambridgema.gov/deptann.cfm?story_id=2042
The Cambridge Women's Center still stands today as a result! I will be leading sing along songs from that wild time.
Monday March 16
6:30 p.m.
Cambridge City Hall Annex
Sponsored by Cambridge Historical Commission and Cambridge Women's Commission
See below:
http://www.cambridgema.gov/deptann.cfm?story_id=2042
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