stopping to remark on the slender novels I've loved

Of course I teach, write, and write about memoir. Of course I write, and write about, young adult literature. Of course I take my stab at poems.

But don't think I'm not also in love with, perhaps most deeply admiring of, novels written for adults. Because I have not found a way to do this work myself. Because I don't know how.

Yesterday I raved about Swimming Home. This past weekend, in the Chicago Tribune, Reply to a Letter from Helga. A few weeks ago, The Colour of Milk, and before that You Remind Me of Me, The Orchardist, Boleto, Book of Clouds, Out Stealing Horses, The Disappeared, American Music, The Sense of an Ending, the Alice McDermott novels, the books featured in this yellowing snapshot above (and others). These slender books that devastate with their shimmering, dangerous sentence, structure, form. These books that have left me staggered on the couch.

I don't know what I would do without them, truly. I don't know that I'd have the same faith in humankind if these books were not now in my blood, if they were not (fractionally) mine.

There is still room to do what no one has ever done before. There are still stories untold. I may be getting older, but: there are more stories to be found. Genius abounds.

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my Chicago Tribune review of Reply to a Letter from Helga/Bergsveinn Birgisson

I had the great privilege of reading Reply to a Letter from Helga by the Icelandic novelist Bergsveinn Birgisson (translated by Philip Roughton) for the Chicago Tribune.

Yesterday the review appeared in the Tribune. I share fragments with you here, with the hope that you will seek out the book and read it for yourself. It moved me deeply.

From my review:

It is a story built of sheep horns, tussocks, gale winds, fishing huts, bone button holders, wolffish skin lampshades, young puffins, half-dried cod and one lovingly smoked corpse of a woman dead too long in a remote stretch of frozen landscape. It is folk tale and philosophy, a farmer's sensibilities and his favorite remembered poems. It is, most of all, elemental.

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