Eastern Rising

Finally updating from Lutsk, Ukraine. Have been struggling with internet troubles, but they seem to be okay at the moment. The trip in was long and tiring. Pellston to Detroit, to Amsterdam, to Kiev, then Lviv, and finally Lutsk. The trip took some 30 hours with three time changes and daylight changing to darkness, then back through the entire cycle. I am now a phenomenon at Gymnasium 18, where students greet me with part wonder, part awe, and part disinterest. The staff has been incredibly warm, and each day a new teacher becomes my guide. I have been to the bank with one, the supermarket with another, and today to an art museum with two more. I am living in a small hotel that looks more like an office building, but is literally a 200 meter walk from the school.
Each day lunch at school consists of soup, bread, meat, pasta, and cabbage salad of some type. The head of the canteen thought I didn't like her food because I didn't eat it all the first day I was there, but there was simply too much. I have made peace with her now.
My hotel room is small, but comfortable. The television didn't work the first three days, so I read and listened to Ukrainian radio. Music is soothing whatever the language.
Tomorrow more school, more culture, and hopefully more internet coverage.

Eastern Horizon

Off to the Ukraine in a week, where I'll be reading and writing with mostly middle school students in a school in Lutsk. In the west, the town is staunchly Ukrainian, I hear, unlike its western cousins who are more likely to be pro Russian. After the recent election, however, the entire country might be undergoing a Russian revolution. I will be there two weeks, speaking to students and working with teachers of English. I've been reading Borderlands by Anna Reid for some background. A history of Ukraine, the book winds back to the Cossack period and before, eventually wending forward to the late 20th century.
I'm also slowly working into Taras Bulba by Gogol, as he's the West's version of a Ukrainian classic. This might be more of a plane read, as I've not made it deep into the story as of yet.
Stay tuned.

Dark Evening

I've been through Idaho, and read much about its wonderful trout fishing. I even met a teacher from Moscow, Idaho who I found to be perfectly intelligent. I am glad to say I have no experience with the Idaho depicted in Brian Hart's new novel Then Came The Evening.
Hart's characters are meth fueled and pain marked, oppressed by family strife that runs deeper than any trout stream and is harder than any mountainside.
When Tracy Doerner shows decides to reclaim his dead grandparent's failing homestead, he finds the work is not as hard as the emotional upheaval he must endure. His father Bandy, incarcerated and without prospects, never knew the son he shared with his estranged and drug addled ex-wife Iona.
When Tracy falls off the roof of the dilapidated farmhouse, the family's sharply divided trajectory angles back on one another, bringing the past to weigh on the future. Bandy, banged up in prison, finds himself drawn to Tracy, the son he didn't know, as well as to Iona, the meth-head who's traded drugs for a shot at restoration.
Hart, a first time novelist, gets bogged down in minutia on occasion, but drags the story out of the dirt long enough to outline believable characters mired in regrettable circumstances.

3000 Year Echo

Homer is alive and well in David Malouf's new novel Ransom. Told in dispassionate third person, the crux of the tale is the competing emotions of Achilles and Priam. Between them lays the body of dead Hector, killed when Achilles' rage boiled over, pushed to action after the death of his cousin Patroclus.
For his part, Priam is defeated at Troy, worried that his family will think ill of him, and aged in the face of conflict. Taking possession of his son's body drives the old King, hoping he can reclaim some small portion of what has been taken.
The two men come together in a choreography of grief that Malouf orchestrates with a deft touch, the language at once powerful and tender.
That Homer is alive some 3000 years after his death is a testament to the power of story. Any reader, or non reader, who cannot hear this echo, is likely deaf in other ways as well.

Resonance

What literate male of my age wasn't affected by J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye? The acerbic Holden Caufield, short on patience and long on insight, insinuated himself into the culture as a wit and a wonder. He couldn't abide rules, but he also couldn't abide phonies. Holden, his sister Phoebe, and his acquaintances from Pency Prep established Salinger as the conscience of rebellion from the 1950s on. Holden was a thinking man's malcontent, an intellectual rogue who wanted nothing more than to be left alone, as the world had turned to mush all around him.
Salinger, like his pint sized protagonist, turned away from the larger world as well, settling in tiny Cornish, New Hampshire. The story is well established, though the truth will never be out.
Salinger insulated his life with more than 50 years off the literary map. His passing is a mark that will go little marked after a brief run up of publicity about his most famous character. Salinger could have embraced the world, but in the end his legacy would have been determined the same way, as a result of his work. This is what resonates when the voice has fallen silent.

Lynch Delivers, Finally

Readers, particularly those in Michigan, have been waiting for several years now for Thomas Lynch's new collection of fiction. Author of poetry and essays, Lynch is well known for his non fiction, particularly that focused on his other career, funeral home director. Lynch's The Undertaking has been buzzing since its publication. A National Book award nominee, Lynch has long promised a work of fiction. Apparition & Late Fiction brings together a single novella and four short stories, all of which showcase Lynch's poetic tendencies. His prose is lyrical and large.
Conclusions will arrive soon about how well his command of the essay translates to his new fiction. Longtime Lynch readers will, however, be pleased to at last have the chance to assess the possibilities.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year of reading, with new books about Greg Mortenson's ongoing efforts, the centennial of the University of Michigan Biological Station in northern Michigan, some fiction, and a new collection of Wendell Berry poetry. There is never a shortage of good books to read and never a shortage of reasons to open them, particularly this time of year, when the days are short, the nights, long, and the light more appropriate for reading than for running.