"Take The Joy And Bear The Sorrow"

I did not write about the audio book I listened to last month - Charles Frazier's Nightwoods. My listening is so disjointed - some in the car, some on the treadmill - with days sometimes in between. This book was so dynamic, so beautifully read by Will Patton, I knew I was missing too much. I knew I wanted to read the book before I wrote about it.
(Will Patton also narrates Frazier's Thirteen Moons. Frazier himself narrates his first, highly acclaimed novel,  Cold Mountain. I hope to listen to it just to compare the narrative voices and to enjoy Cold Mountain again.)

"You can't even cross a river without having to pay a toll." (Archilochos - 7th Century B.C.) This is the epigram in Frazier's book, Nightwoods. It speaks to the heavy cost paid by Frazier's characters of just plain surviving in North Carolina's backwoods of the early 1960's.
For reasons of her own, Luce has chosen to live a solitary life away from civilization. She is caretaker of an old abandoned summer lodge an hour away from the small town where she grew up. Her peaceful, solitary life is shattered when a social worker delivers into her care the young children of her murdered sister. Luce is just beginning to break through the children's traumatized insulation when their step-father moves to town. He was acquitted of murdering their mother, but he's looking for the money he had stolen and she had secreted before her death. He believes the children and their Aunt Luce must have the money.
Through alternating chapters we learn more about all the characters narrated by Frazier's quality writing. This is an example - when Luce is asked why she took the job as caretaker of the lodge: "She said she took the job at a point where she was of a mind to get over thinking about hopes and fears and desires. They didn't help a bit when it came to voyaging safely through a day. Just live every one as it came and not let people intrude on you. Shut up and hope everybody else did the same. Strive for whole uneventful weeks where the weather was about all that changed. She pointed out that weather was plenty interesting to watch as it passed over you, and it had entertained people for thousands of years. And not just immediate weather but also the larger movements of the seasons. You had to learn how to feel the long flow and not get hung up on the day-to-day. Big swellings and recedings, upturned and downturned sweeps linked in slow rhythms built from millions of tiny parts -- animal, vegetable, mineral -- not just temperature and length of daylight. For example, the way a rhododendron changed throughout the year, month by month."
Writing such as this is why I read - not just for the enjoyment of the story - but for the pleasure in the words and how they make me feel - for what I learn about all I'll never know. Frazier and authors like him make me think.

 As promised when I read Virginia Ellis's The Wedding Dress last month, I read her next novel, The Photograph. The former had a Civil War setting, the latter is set during WWII. It is a book about a young girl coming of age during a time when women had to deal with their men going off to war and how it affected their lives. I like reading about this era. This book is a nice sentimental look at that time.

Having just discovered P.D. James, I was ready to read her latest novel, Death Comes to Pemberley featuring characters from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. In her opening 'Author's Note' she writes: "I owe an apology to the shade of Jane Austen for involving her beloved Elizabeth in the trauma of a murder investigation......." "No doubt she would have replied to my apology by saying that, had she wished to dwell on such odious subjects, she would have written this story herself, and done it better." I concur. This book is hardly worth reading. It is another example of anything a popular writer writes getting published.

It was ironic that at the same time I read P.D. James's attempt at a Jane Austen novel I was already reading Stephanie Barron's Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor (Being the First Jane Austen Mystery). If you are an Austen fan and want to read mysteries based upon her and her era, I recommend Barron's series. The writing is true to the times and the mystery and its solving are believable. There appear to be fourteen books in this series. And while I found the first to be entertaining reading, I probably won't go in search of more. I'd rather spend my reading time with authors like Charles Frazier.

"Take the joy and bear the sorrow, looking past your hopes and fears:
Learn to recognize the measured dance that orders all our years."
     (From 'To His Soul' by Archilochos)