Issue 3 | April 2008
April in the northern latitudes is a time when people get the hell out of the house. Cabin fever makes even a fifty-degree day an opportunity to parade in the yard with just a t-shirt on.
Reading a book outside is about the most perfect of our pastimes. We find the activity described in literature, we find it in history. Jane Austen regularly showed her heroines sitting by a stream or pond, reading a novel or a book of poetry. And who among we readers can forget Wordsworth or Keats writing about reading (and writing) in the gardens and near the shore of their home-county lake.
This month, Ways of Seeing reviews three books that are either based on being out of doors or perfect reads to do in a chair or at the park, soaking up the sun as Spring gives us the best days of the year.
No Man’s Lands takes us on an epic journey, retracing of the path by which Odysseus made his way home—by windblown seas, held captive by nymphs for years, attacked and scratched out of deadly situations by his wits—to Ithaca. Author Scott Huler undertook this journey—done in six months, while his wife was nearing the delivery of their first child—on his own dare, after being induced to finally read The Odyssey, a book he had only recently proclaimed he would never read. Huler has a purpose: to stand in the places where Odysseus stood on each of the fourteen spots around the Mediterranean which he washed up on his ten-year passage home.
Detective Story brings for the first time to the English language Imre Kertész’s existential story of false redemption, false hope, and state-sponsored retribution. This Hungarian writer survived a death sentence in Nazi concentration camps, and made his oeuvre a reflection of life in and under totalitarian regimes. Yet this story takes place in an unnamed Latin American country, in a contemporary setting, revealing that government does not change from generation to generation unless the people take control.
Refresh Refresh collects ten short stories focused on the small town life of blue collar Oregonian men and young men. Benjamin Percy teaches writing in Wisconsin, but his mind seems never to have left Oregon — as well that it should not, given the plethora of emotions, events, memories, and problems his home state has yielded for his fecund imagination and close inspection. The stories are at once brilliantly conceived and simple in their effective rendering of a life most of us know, on some level.
