Today is May 10th, the day everyone has been waiting for, National Train Day! Are you looking for a way to “get your choo choo on?” If so, come by the store and get a copy of Howard Bahr’s new novel, hot off the presses, Pelican Road. Howard’s fourth novel chronicles the lives of characters working on the rail road in the early forties and has been a hit with all those who have read it so far. I haven’t had a chance to read it myself yet, but truly enjoyed the segments he read on Thursday night at the kick off signing on his tour.
Category: Southern Fiction (Page 24 of 24)
The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Vintage International (2006)
“A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.”
[The Road, excerpt from rear cover sleeve]
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The Road is Cormac McCarthy’s tenth, and most recently published novel (2006). It is, without any doubt, my favorite piece of literature I’ve discovered this year. It is also the most thought-provoking work I’ve become entranced with in some time. Once you have entered into McCarthy’s frightening masterpiece here, you will never forget it.
The story follows a father and son, through a crude, life and death struggle in a bleak, and terrifying, post-apocalyptic world. The situations they encounter along this road reveal what man is truly capable of when stripped of his moral boundaries.
There is a stark, yet unexpected, sense of realism that the author portrays for the reader in this achromatic world. The author masterfully strips away the names of the primary characters the reader becomes immediately entrenched with. The vivid imagery we see of our present world–nature and man’s presence in it–is reduced to an ashen, almost hopeless non-existence. When the father and son encounter what few humans are left in this shrouded world, they see how man will go to almost any lengths for survival–no matter how depraved. Once civilization is reduced to almost nothing, the line of distinction between man and beast becomes nightmarishly blurry.
Though many of the author’s images will brand themselves into your memory, one glimpse of hope I encountered in this book has yet to leave my mind:
“There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who’s not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right.”
This story will haunt you, and it will burn itself into your consciousness. It won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Literature, and Cormac McCarthy truly merits this accomplishment from his creation here.
I must confess that I haven’t read much Southern Fiction lately. I have been swimming in a sea of intrigue (I cannot get enough of Tudor England) and blood (I have taken over the mystery section)! That being said, I wasn’t really sure that I was going to like Mudbound when Joe brought me an advanced copy and asked me to take a look at it. I took it home to read a few chapters over the weekend and came back to work on Monday having finished the book and let everyone know that I loved it!
The story takes place in the Mississippi Delta in 1946. It centers around two families, The McAllans and The Jacksons. The Jacksons are share tenants on the McAllan’s recently purchased farm. Laura McAllan is trying to learn “the ropes” of country living and enlists the help of Florence Jackson to help her around the house. Both families have family members fighting in the war, Laura’s bother-in-law, Jamie and Ronsel, the eldest Jackson son. Both men come home around the same time and develop a secret friendship that causes trouble for both families. “The men and women of each family relate their versions of events as they see them, and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale.”
Hillary Jordan grew up in Texas and Oklahoma. Mudbound is her first novel and has been awarded the 2006 Bellwether Prize, founded by Barbara Kingslover to recognize literature of social responsibility. She will be signing and reading at Lemuria on Thursday, March 20, 2008 at 5:00. Please come by and congratulate her on this novel whose characters and storyline will stay with you long after you have finished this story of the Jim Crow South.
“This is storytelling at the height of its powers: the ache of wrongs not yet made right, the fierce attendance of history made as real as rain, as true as this minute. Hillary Jordan writes with the force of a Delta storm.” –Barbara Kingsolver
After teaching English for 13 years at Motlow State College in Tullahoma, Tenn., decorated author Howard Bahr says “it’s good to be back home in the South again.”
Geography experts, listen up.
“To me, Tennessee is not a Southern state,” explains Bahr, a Mississippi native who is living in Jackson and will be teaching writing classes at Belhaven College in the fall. “Tennessee is lovely, but more of a border state in my mind.
“The people of Mississippi are friendlier and kinder to one another, more tolerant of one another. There’s a certain grace about the people in the Deep South that is lacking in other areas.”
Bahr’s definition of the Deep South consists of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. And it is in that region in which the 61-year-old Bahr wants to spend his days writing, living and “contributing to the community.”
“There is a sense of energy and creativity in Jackson – lots of artists and writers, and I’d like to have a membership card,” says Bahr, whose 1997 Civil War novel The Black Flower earned him the prestigious Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was also chosen as a New York Times Notable Book.
John Evans, owner of Lemuria Books in Jackson, says Bahr’s return to Mississippi – particularly to Jackson – “should be a point of pride for all of us.”
“We’ve lost a lot of our great writers here in Jackson,” says Evans, referring to the deaths of Willie Morris, Eudora Welty and Margaret Walker Alexander in recent years. “Howard Bahr is a serious literary writer. In a state known for serious writers, I think it’s extremely important to have a great writer living in our community.
“Plus,” Evans adds with a chuckle, “he’s a really fun guy to be around.”
Bahr, a veteran of the Vietnam War, followed The Black Flower with two more Civil War novels – The Year of Jubilo and The Judas Field, which has just been released in paperback.
“They formed a trilogy, which I never meant to happen,” says Bahr, a former professor at the University of Mississippi and the curator at William Faulkner’s Oxford home, Rowan Oak, for nine years. “But I think I’ve written about all I can on the Civil War. I don’t anticipate any more of those.”
His next book, Pelican Road, has been purchased by MacAdam Cage of San Francisco and is in the editing stages. It is due out next spring.
“It’s a book about working on the railroad,” says Bahr, who spent five years as a railroad yard clerk and brakeman from 1968 through 1973. “There have been lots of kids books done on railroads and trains, but never a serious book about what it used to be like working on the railroad when they had cabooses and used hand signals and all that.”
And even though Bahr doesn’t have a concrete idea for another book, he still goes to his computer every night to see what his subconscience might offer.
“Writing is a compulsion,” he says. “I think most artists will tell you that … the painter has to go to his studio, the potter has to go to his wheel.
“If I don’t sit down and at least write a few sentences or paragraphs and see what comes out, I feel like I haven’t done my duty for the day.”