by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 28, 2008 | Pam Houston, reviews |
I just finished Toni Morrison’s new novel, A Mercy. Which was amazing. Yet I now regret that, while I was reading it, I spent so much time trying to figure out the story. I believe that if I had just let myself succumb to the effect of the words, the story...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 27, 2008 | poetry |
Jane Hirshfield writes: Having eaten the pears. Having eaten the black figs, the white figs. Eaten the apples. Table be strewn. Table be strewn with stems, table with peelings of grapefruit and pleasure. Table be strewn with pleasure, what was here to be done...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 26, 2008 | life, shapes |
In Remembering the Bone House, Nancy Mairs writes, “Here I develop that ability to concatenate events which characterizes human consciousness and makes ‘daily life’ possible.” I had to look it up. To concatenate is to link together, as in a...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 24, 2008 | memoir, memory, reviews |
Remembering the Bone House is one of my all-time favorite books. Nancy Mairs wrote this memoir in 1989. It was out of print for a while, but then Beacon Press did a new printing in 1995, for which the author wrote a new preface. In it, she called...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 21, 2008 | craft of writing, memory, reviews, truth |
The Gathering, by Irish writer Anne Enright, won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. I read it in April. In this novel, the narrator describes her family of origin in terms of the labels we acquire, as families and as individuals in a family. “The Hegartys didn’t...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 19, 2008 | journeys, reviews, shapes |
If I weren’t reading all of Rachel Cusk’s books to look at how her writing develops over time, I would not have finished her sixth book, In the Fold, published in 2005. As one reviewer wrote, “too little happened to too many people.” Or...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 17, 2008 | Pam Houston |
“I wonder what it would be like,” she said to me on one of those days that make you feel that you have chosen the right profession, “if I could once and for all get my mother out of my head.” “Picture it,” I told her. “Tell...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 15, 2008 | craft of writing, details, novels, reading |
Just as Home, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award in Fiction, has been called a companion to Gilead, this post is a companion to yesterday’s. Prompted by comments, I wanted to add that if you enjoyed Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson’s first novel,...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 14, 2008 | novels, reviews, shapes |
For anyone who enjoyed Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s second novel, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, you will love her new novel, Home. For she has just crossed town, so to speak, and turned around to tell us the story from a different porch. On...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 11, 2008 | truth |
“That’s not what she means,” I said. “She means, like, we are what’s happened to us. So if you take away what’s happened to us, then, you know…Well, who would you be?” “I’d be someone different.”...
