These words from
The Washington Post's Ron Charles drew me to
The Coffins of Little Hope:
The Coffins of Little Hope is like an Edward Gorey cartoon stitched in pastel needlepoint. Its creepiness scurries along the edges of these heartwarming pages like some furry creature you keep convincing yourself you didn't see.
You're in, right? You want to know more? I bought the book, I got in and I stayed, from the very first line:
I still use a manual typewriter (a 1953 Underwood portable, in a robin's-egg blue) because the soft pip-pip-pip of the typing of keys on a computer keyboard doesn't quite fit with my sense of what writing sounds like.
.... to the last:
You were young only minutes ago.
Reading the pages in between was like watching the lights of a carnival go on—the hurly burly commotion of color, the hyperkinetic blink of possibility, the flavorful oddness of a
sui generis cast of characters. There's Essie Myles, an 83-year-old obituary writer for the local, small-town paper. There's the possible kidnapping of a possible daughter (yes, that's right, we never know for absolute certain if the kidnapped daughter is a scam or a true loss). There's the final installment of a famed young adult book that's being printed by Essie's press. Parts of that book get leaked (or
are those parts the real book?) Gentle weirdnesses come and go (but have they left forever?). These small-town people face all kinds of trouble (or they make it up), and Schaeffert can't say no to the sweet tangent.
It's a wild bob and weave. It's profoundly and preposterously well-imagined. There are lines here, plenty of them, that most writers would give their polished eye tooth to lay a claim to. Taken together,
Coffins is a delight—a book that you cannot wrangle with. Just let it happen to you. Stumble off, dazed.
Ever since the goldfinches began appearing outside my window (my mother's spirit, I've thought, I think), I've been paying closer attention to their effervescence—the way their feathers go green, then gray in autumn; the way they'll sit on the spokes of their feeder, calm, while the bright male cardinal, the blue jay, the squirrel look with envy from the tree.
In Hovering Flight, Joyce Hinnefeld's glorious first novel, is, therefore, the perfect book for me this weekend. Perfect because it is about birds, ecology, mothers and daughters. Perfect because so much of it takes place not far from my own part of the world, in Bucks County. Perfect because if it is masterfully wrought—quiet yet momentous, cohering, heartfull, whole. Hinnefeld is a gifted, informed, intelligent writer—careful, tender, never excessive—and in unraveling this story about a bird-loving professor and the student who becomes his wife, this story about their daughter, this story about eco-activism and a decision to die, Hinnefeld yields what feels to be a true, uncompromised story in language clear as bird call.
Listen, for example, to these few lines from Flight's beginning. It would have been easy to muck this up with too many words, too many adjectives, some compound metaphor. Hinnefeld restrains herself, avoids complication, and yields the tang of beauty:
"What she wanted was not only to draw birds but to understand them, to come as close as she could to feeling what it was like to fly with hollow bones. To sit atop a warm and throbbing egg within a delicate bed that rests in the crook of a branch. To sing not from something like a human throat but from a place deep within the breast."
I'd had plans for months to buy this book. Ron Charles' review in last Sunday's Washington Post made me feel as if I could wait no longer:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/16/AR2008101603318.html
You had me with the quote about the typewriter :)
i like the last line.