Thursday, December 16, 2021 – Simon the Fiddler
“Simon the Fiddler” is a book the Addison Book Club is reading during the month of December. I am scheduled to review and discuss it with the book blub on Jan. 3. The book is by Paulette Jiles who also wrote the popular “News of the World” which was made into a movie starring Tom Hanks. This novel is also set in post-Civil War Texas. Per Kirkus Reviews, here is a synopsis of the book:
During his few reluctant months in the Confederate Army, Simon Boudlin’s main concerns are staying alive and protecting his precious fiddle so that after the war he can make enough money to buy some land and settle down with the right woman. He sees her after his unit surrenders, at a dinner for the officers: Doris Dillon is an Irish indentured servant to Yankee Col. Webb, and by the time Simon learns her name he already knows that Webb is an arrogant SOB who mistreats the help and is nasty to musicians. That’s the last Simon sees of Doris for more than a year, as he forms a band with fellow veterans — three of the novel’s many deft characterizations — and they play their way across Texas, technically under military rule but mostly in a state of near anarchy; the musicians’ gigs, brilliantly captured in Jiles’ quiet but resonant prose, are as likely to end in a brawl as with applause. Simon and his mates bunk down in stolen boats and shelled-out buildings that make visible the cost of war, but magnificent descriptions of their travels make palpable the varied beauty of the landscape — from East Texas pines to the banks of the Nueces River — where Simon plays at a wild Tejano wedding and finally has enough money to buy his dreamed-of land. He’s been in touch with Doris via letters supposedly from his Irish-American drummer, Patrick, who helpfully invents some shared relatives, and is making his way toward San Antonio to rescue his beloved, who’s finding it increasingly difficult to evade Webb’s determined advances. The pace picks up and tension rises after Simon reaches San Antonio; there are some menacing moments, but clever plotting has laid the groundwork for a happy ending with just enough hints of potential troubles ahead to remain true to Jiles’ loving but cleareyed portrait of Texas’ vibrant, violent frontier culture.
Reviews of the book:
“…thoroughly charming, and when the final battle royal arrives in San Antonio it’s just the rousing ballad we want to hear.” – Ron Charles, Washington Post
“The reader is treated to a kind of alchemy on the page when character, setting and song converge all at the right notes, generating an authentic humanity that is worth remembering and celebrating.” – New York Times
“Jiles’ sparse but lyrical writing is a joy to read … It’s a beautifully written book and a worthy follow-up to ‘News of the World’ … lose yourself in this entertaining tale.” – ABC News online
According to Wikipedia, Paulette Jiles — aka Paulette K. Jiles, Paulette Jiles-Johnson — was born April 4, 1943, and is an American poet, memoirist and novelist. She was born in Salem, Missouri, and attended college at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, graduating in 1968 with a major in romance languages. She moved to Toronto, Canada in 1969, where she worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and, subsequently, helped set up native language FM radio stations with indigenous peoples in the far north of Ontario and Quebec for the next 10 years. In the process, she learned the Ojibwe language spoken by the Anishinaabeg peoples in Ontario and elsewhere.
After marrying Jim Johnson, she moved with him to San Antonio in 1991. After several years of travel, including living in Mexico, the couple resettled in San Antonio in 1995, buying a house in the historical district. Since her divorce in 2003, Jiles has lived on a 36-acre ranch near Utopia, Texas, about 80 miles west of San Antonio.
Her 2016 novel “News of the World” was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.
According to paulettejiles.com:
I sing in a choir, which I enjoy very much. I am an alto, and so have to carry harmony. Since I am very deficient in reading music, I depend on the person next to me and the basses behind me to find my note. I have Piano For Dummies and a keyboard, but I am not making much headway. Luckily, I have a good ear and am neither sharp nor flat excessively. I envy the sopranos. Especially the lilting voices on the Alleluias—and they get to do the melody. But somebody has to chop wood and carry water.
I am working on a sequel to Lighthouse Island — after all, if you spend time and effort to construct an alternative world, why abandon it after one work? The next story about the Western Cessions, aka Drought World, will be about different people, same arid continent covered in ‘city’ and blasted by dust. Until the rains come.
I don’t know how many dystopian novels I’ve read in the course of writing Lighthouse Island. And thus, I came upon the master, Jack Vance. Next to Bradbury, of course.
In the meantime, I have necessary work to do here on the ranchito, including feeding and care of two horses and a donkey, fence work, hauling feed and hay, and cleaning stock tanks. I write in the mornings; but when the hot weather comes, I will have to shift that to the afternoons, as the cool early morning hours will be the only time to get outside work done. I ride with friends once or twice a week. I don’t travel all that much, but when I do, it is usually to Missouri to see family, to San Antonio, Texas, to go to the opera or to have lunch with friends, or to Llano, Texas, to visit with writers Laurie Jameson and WC Jameson.
The Texas drought continues. San Antonio is going to Stage 5 water restrictions. Bad.
From Jiles’ blog post on 11-21-2020:
I won’t be posting here anymore for some time, WordPress has changed everything, and now there is this complicated mess about ”blocks” and no place to add media or pictures, and I just don’t have the time to spend all morning and half the afternoon figuring out their clever new terminology about blocks, classic blocks, other kinds of blocks and so on. So, my blog is shut down for the foreseeable future.
Blog post Oct. 7, 2020:
Dark Tabby sits and looks out over the valley for long periods of time everyday, I have no idea what he sees or what he looks for. He is the No. 1 son of the little stray I took in more than two years ago, who came to be named Sooty. He’s about a year and a half old and probably has many adventures, and every morning trots away from the house expecting more.
Waterloo Express
“Waterloo Express” was Paulette Jiles’ first book published in 1973 in Canada. Sharon Thesen, who wrote the introduction for it in 2019, said “Paulette Jiles’ ‘Waterloo Express’ must have roared onto the Canadian poetry scene in 1973 with a blazing headlamp and a steely racket … Here was a voice whose directness was arresting, even as it had a certain mystery and unwillingness to ‘communicate’ much ‘information.’ Instead, a fabulous range of images was articulated with idiomatic clarity … She is a contemporary version of Sylvia Plath — except that Jiles’s work and life rejected female confinement, whether it be domestic or national, physical or mental. In “Waterloo Express” her existence is ephemeral and dislocated, on the way to somewhere; or, once somewhere, there only temporarily, neither belonging or belonged to. The speaker of these poems has agency; if it is rueful at times, it is always sensitive, aware, alert.
The Golden Hawks – Where We Live series
According to Amazon, first published in 1978, “The Golden Hawks” is an honest and touching look at life on the edge of a Canadian city. A volume in the “Where We” Live series. The Golden Hawks want a clubhouse of their own. But where can they find one in their new housing development on the edge of the city? First they try to make their clubhouse in Joe's bedroom, but their parents get angry when the kids hammer holes in the wall. Then, they scare themselves silly looking for scrap wood in an empty and spooky apartment building. Finally, they try to make money, so they can build a clubhouse. Will the Golden Hawks ever have a place to call their own?
Celestial Navigation
Paulette Jiles’s celebrated, multi-award-winning poetry collection originally published in 1984. According to Amazon, these are poems of scorching intensity, which examine the politics of childhood and love; explore the rigors and blessings of living in the far north; mark the way stations of a life of discovery and exploration. The result is a poetry of singular, telling immediacy.
Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma Kola
With the spark and zest of a gin fizz, Paulette Jiles invites readers along on an unforgettable rail trip. Our hatted heroine — a Katharine Hepburn type — is leaving America, escaping to Canada, hoping to find her Spencer Tracy somewhere in the dome car between Vancouver and points east. This heroine on the run soon finds her handsome man who happens to be a detective pursuing her. Acclaimed by The New York Times as "the best train story since Mary McCarthy’s “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt," “Sitting in the Club Car,” published in 1986, is an elegant, illustrated, witty romp that combines an old-fashioned love story with period detective fiction.
The Late Great Human Road Show
According to David Helwig’s article “Starting over” in Books in Canada, “The Late Great Human Road Show,” published in 1988, is perhaps best regarded as a fable, "ordinary people in the last days," to borrow the title of a poem by Jay Macpherson. The book takes place in the Cabbagetown area of Toronto after some disaster, presumably a nuclear war. Most of the population has inexplicably vanished, but here and there human beings; remain, mostly those who were in a deep sleep or unconscious at the time of The Event.
Toronto is full of wrecked and abandoned cars, streetcars, trash. There are constant storms of glass as the huge windows of the high towers come loose and fall to earth. There is a ceiling of low clouds, occasional moments of "piss-yellow" sun.
The best thing about The Late Great Human Road Show is the precision and skill of its prose. ("The cow was black and white with an aluminum ear tab, and the grace of a circus tent, which is act without grace.") The empty city is imagined with a consistently sharp sense of detail.
The book is thoughtful and cleanly constructed, but there is same sense of philosophical disjunction or incompleteness. An acceptance of the ordinariness of ordinary things, an attempt, to reject melodrama - these make the first part of a moral statement, but none of the characters has the strength to go beyond this. The band of children watched over by the drunken Roxana is slightly sentimentalized. There are lovely moments when the children's reaction to Cow, their dumb love for her animal warmth, makes a statement against the force of death, abort the goodness of merely living, but these moments are undermined by sentimentality and the presence of too many characters who seem to be constructed to allow the author to grind knives.
The Jesse James Poems
According to Zareen who rated "The Jesse James Poems" published in 1988 with 5 stars at GoodReads, Jiles mixes truth with hearsay, lyric with prose. A set of poems that glorify a very American vision of freedom while condemning a very American vision of institution. Who's the real bad guy? Two free radicals or a society that damns a dancing woman? Very easy to read but still challenges.
Blackwater
According to George Garrett’s Oct. 23, 1988, article “Upright Among the Swine” in the New York Times, The title "Blackwater," published in 1988, comes from the little town of Blackwater, Missouri, in the Ozarks, where the author, born in 1943, grew up and about which she writes with affection and amusement and gritty authenticity.
The authenticity of her work firmly evokes a realized sense of place — places, really, including most of Canada, not ignoring its remote Arctic and subarctic regions, the Canary Islands and North Africa. This sense of a real world with sharp corners and edges and with real people with muscles and bones, minds and spirits, hopes and memories, characters who cast shadows, may surprise you.
Song to the Rising Sun
According to Barbara Carey’s article “Starfire” at Books in Canada, “Song to the Rising Sun,” published in 1989, most of the collection — a mixture of poetry, drama and fiction — was written for the air waves and so should be experienced primarily as sound, not text. The emphasis on the oral/aural is what holds the book together. Despite the variety of genres,and settings that range from the high Arctic to Morocco to the Ozarks, all the material in “Song to the Rising Sun” relies on such age-old devices as repetition of both language and syntax and the use of choruses and direct speeches to the audience. There's even a hint of the liturgical in the rhythms of the title poem, a long, mesmerizing work that speaks of, among other things, the threat of ecological disaster and the hope of redemption.
Cousins
According to Publisher’s Weekly, poet Jiles — on a trip home from Canada to the Missouri Ozarks — has a romance with Jim Johnson, a married retired army officer and Vietnam vet. Despite their political disagreements — she's a dove, he's a hawk — Johnson leaves his wife to travel with Jiles across the U.S. south on a pilgrimage to find and interview the author's cousins on her father's side. Jiles successfully brings their love affair to life, recounting mutual passion as well as fiery arguments with spirit and wit. Woven throughout the travel anecdotes are interesting verbatim interviews with Jiles's cousins, who unravel family mysteries and give her a new perspective on her background. "Cousins," published in 1992, is an inventive memoir combining adventure, introspection and the redemptive power of love between two middle-aged people who revel in their differences.
Flying Lesson: Selected Poems
In “Flying Lesson: Selected Poems,” published in 1995, Jiles has brought together a selection of poems representative of her work over the last decade. Many of her poems exploring the white frozen interior of the Canadian north will be found in this volume, as well as a series of poems calling up the bar and bawdy-house days of composer Scott Joplin's ragtime — appearing here in book form for the first time. Her delight is in narrative lyrically evoking the landscape through which her stories travel. In "Song to the Rising Sun," commissioned for CBC Radio, she celebrates the Arctic landscape even as pollution threatens its harsh purity.
North Spirit: Travels Among the Cree and Ojibway Nations and Their Star Maps
According to Amazon, in 1974, when Paulette Jiles was first sent by the CBC to work as a journalist in Big Trout Lake, a village without radio or television in remote northern Ontario, she didn't know a bush plane from a backpack. She had little experience of the north or of the local cultures. “North Spirit,” published in 1995, is at turns lyrical, witty and reflective, and is based on the seven years Jiles spent working with the Northern Cree and Ojibway peoples, who call themselves Anishinabe.
The book evokes a time when new technology — including the communication systems the author helps introduce — is beginning to clash with the traditional culture. Jiles' episodic narrative — a unique blend of autobiography, history, geography, poetry, theater, mythology, and travelogue —documents and explores this turning point in the culture of the Anishinabe. At the center of the author's journey is her search for the meaning of the remote and sometimes terrifying Oda-Ka-Daun or Stern Padler, who moves his cosmic vessel through the heavens. As she seeks to unravel this mystery, she recounts her many adventures among the Anishinabe people and reveals the enduring legacy of their northern mythology.
Enemy Women
According to GoodReads, for the Colleys of southeastern Missouri, the War between the States is a plague that threatens devastation, despite the family's avowed neutrality. For 18-year-old Adair Colley, it is a nightmare that tears apart her family and forces her and her sisters to flee. The treachery of a fellow traveler, however, brings about her arrest, and she is caged with the criminal and deranged in a filthy women's prison. But young Adair finds that love can live even in a place of horror and despair. Her interrogator, a Union major, falls in love with her and vows to return for her when the fighting is over. Before he leaves for battle, he bestows upon her a precious gift: freedom. Now an escaped "enemy woman," Adair must make her harrowing way south buoyed by a promise ... seeking a home and a family that may be nothing more than a memory. “Enemy Women” was published in 2002.
According to Amazon, oil is king of East Texas during the darkest years of the Great Depression. The Stoddard girls — responsible Mayme, whip-smart tomboy Jeanine and bookish Bea — know no life but an itinerant one, trailing their father from town to town as he searches for work on the pipelines and derricks. But in a year of devastating drought and dust storms, the family's fortunes sink further than they ever anticipated when a questionable "accident" leaves the girls and their mother, Elizabeth, alone to confront the cruelest hardships of these hardest of times.
Returning to their previously abandoned family farm, the resilient Stoddard women must now place their last hopes for salvation in a wildcat oil well that eats up what little they have left . . . and on the back of late patriarch Jack's one true legacy, a dangerous racehorse named Smoky Joe. “Stormy Weather” was published in 2007.
The Color of Lightning
According to GoodReads, in 1863, as the War Between the States creeps inevitably toward its bloody conclusion, former Kentucky slave Britt Johnson ventures west into unknown territory with his wife, Mary, and their three children, searching for a life and a future. But their dreams are abruptly shattered by a brutal Indian raid upon the Johnsons' settlement while Britt is away establishing a business. Returning to find his friends and neighbors slain or captured, his eldest son dead, his beloved and severely damaged Mary enslaved and his remaining children absorbed into an alien society that will never relinquish its hold on them, the heartsick freedman vows not to rest until his family is whole again.
A soaring work of the imagination based on oral histories of the post-Civil War years in North Texas, Paulette Jiles's “The Color of Lightning,” published in 2009, is at once an intimate look into the hearts and hopes of tragically flawed human beings and a courageous reexamination of a dark American history.
Lighthouse Island
According to bookbrowse.com, in the coming centuries, the world's population has exploded. The earth is crowded with cities, animals are nearly all extinct and drought is so widespread that water is rationed. There are no maps, no borders, no numbered years and no freedom, except for an elite few. It is a harsh world for an orphan like Nadia Stepan. Growing up, she dreams of a green vacation spot called Lighthouse Island, in a place called the Pacific Northwest. When an opportunity for escape arises, Nadia embarks on a dangerous and sometimes comic adventure. Along the way she meets a man who changes the course of her life: James Orotov, a mapmaker and demolition expert. Together, they evade arrest and head north toward a place of wild beauty that lies beyond the megapolis — Lighthouse Island. “Lighthouse Island” was published in 2013.
News of the World
It is 1870 and Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence.
In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. Four years earlier, a band of Kiowa raiders killed Johanna’s parents and sister; sparing the little girl, they raised her as one of their own. Recently rescued by the U.S. army, the 10-year-old has once again been torn away from the only home she knows.
Their 400-mile journey south through unsettled territory and unforgiving terrain proves difficult and at times dangerous. Johanna has forgotten the English language, tries to escape at every opportunity, throws away her shoes and refuses to act “civilized.” Yet as the miles pass, the two lonely survivors tentatively begin to trust each other, forging a bond that marks the difference between life and death in this treacherous land.
Arriving in San Antonio, the reunion is neither happy nor welcome. The captain must hand Johanna over to an aunt and uncle she does not remember — strangers who regard her as an unwanted burden. A respectable man, Captain Kidd is faced with a terrible choice: abandon the girl to her fate or become — in the eyes of the law — a kidnapper himself. Exquisitely rendered and morally complex, “News of the World,” published in 2016, is a brilliant work of historical fiction that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor and trust.
コメント